Skill classification does matter: estimating the relationship between trade flows and wage inequality

Empirical work must pay careful attention to how it measures the relative skill abundance of countries and the relative skill intensity embodied in trade flows. This paper compiles a new data set, using income levels, average education, manufacturing wages, and an index of these three variables, to classify countries and trade flows as relatively high skill or low skill. Then, in order to show the importance of skill classification, it uses a reduced-form fixed-effects model to estimate the relationship between trade flows and wage inequality. This specification not only controls for any time-invariant omitted variables, but also permits the inclusion of a large number of diverse countries. When more accurate skill rankings are utilized, results suggest that, in high-skill abundant countries, increased trade with lower-skill countries is correlated with an increase in wage inequality. This relationship is significant and highly robust and is driven by the negative relationship between trade and low-skill wages (instead of a positive relationship between trade and high-skill wages.) Results, however, are highly dependent on the skill classification utilized.     

Contract Enforcement and Trade

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of contract enforcement on trade in a large sample of developing economies. The effects of three separate measures capturing contract enforcement (the time required to enforce a contract; the costs to enforce a contract; and the number of procedures required to enforce a contract) on trade were tested using the panel corrected standard errors method of estimation. The results show that the three measures of contract enforcement are negatively and statistically significantly correlated with trade. The findings lead to the conclusion that the ease of contract enforcement is crucial in order to facilitate the speed of trade in the developing group of countries.     

Trading with Conditions: The Effect of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures on the Agricultural Exports from Low‐income Countries

Market access for agricultural products is increasingly determined by capability to comply with a wide array of regulatory measures. From a trade perspective, one of the most important aspects of such regulatory measures is their potential distortionary effect, as their cost of compliance is often asymmetrical across countries. This paper investigates the effect of the European Union's sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures on the exports from low income countries. This study finds that SPS measures result in relatively higher burden for low income countries but that membership in deep trade agreements seems to reduce the difficulties related to compliance with SPS measures. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that while many middle and high income countries have the internal capacity to comply with SPS measures, most low income countries do not.     

绿色贸易措施的政治博弈

随着贸易自由化和全球经济一体化,世界各国出于维护本国国际竞争比较优势战略目标和实现贸易与环境协调发展的客观需要,以可持续发展为口号,以保护环境和人类健康为目的或借口,以产品标准、环境标志、绿色包装、贸易制裁等为手段的绿色贸易措施正在成为国际社会特别是发达国家越来越频繁使用的新的国际贸易保护手段。形形色色的绿色贸易措施正在向系统化、制度化和国际化方向演进。本文通过对近期一些国外经济学家的相关文献回顾,对绿色贸易措施产生的政治博弈过程进行简单的综述,为我国参与新一轮的WTO谈判提供一些理论参考。     

Product Differentiation,the Volume of Trade and Profits under Cournot and Bertrand Duopoly

This article analyses how product differentiation affects the volume of trade under duopoly using Shubik-Levitan demand functions rather than the Bowley demand functions used by Bernhofen (2001). The drawback of Bowley demand functions is that an increase in product differentiation increases the size of the market so the increase in the volume of trade may be the result of the increase in the size of the market rather than the increase in product differentiation per se. The Shubik-Levitan demand functions have the advantage that an increase in product differentiation does not increase the size of the market, but consumers still have a ‘love of variety’. It is shown that the volume of trade in terms of quantities falls with increasing product differentiation when the trade cost is relatively low, but rises with increasing product differentiation when the trade cost is relatively high. Among the results, it is shown that the trade liberalisation is more likely to be profitable under Cournot duopoly than under Bertrand duopoly for differentiated products with a positive trade cost.     

反倾销、反补贴和保障措施——三大贸易救济措施比较分析

众所周知,虽然世贸组织极力倡导国际贸易自由化,并通过多边贸易谈判机制推进国际贸易自由化的进程,但世贸组织并不排斥一定程度和形式的贸易保护,尤其是当大量进口对进口国产生消极影响时,允许进口国采取一定的贸易救济措施来限制进口。近年来,随着我国出口的持续高速增长,越来越多的国家开始频繁对我国的出口实施限制措施,本文通过对反倾销、反补贴和保障措施三大贸易救济措施的比较分析,为我国企业的应对提供了参考意见。     

贸易与环境问题的研究动态与述评

环境问题除了构成一国的资源禀赋外,还影响到生产成本、贸易模式、产业区位以及贸易利得。从20世纪70年代起,随着许多工业化国家相继实施环境规制,环境问题在国际贸易领域开始变得重要起来。本文对贸易与环境问题研究的主要文献进行回顾,从而有助于理解贸易与环境质量之间的复杂联系。     

Proliferating Regional Trade Arrangements: Why and Whither?

This paper investigates why regional trade arrangements (RTAs) are proliferating extensively and how the effects of multiple RTAs, by interacting with each other, evolve over time. Our empirical analysis, based on an extended gravity model utilising a large panel dataset of 175 countries from 1948 to 1999, shows that RTAs on average increase global trade by raising intra‐bloc trade without damaging extra‐bloc trade. The net trade effects, however, heavily depend on the types of RTA strategic evolution over time, which we categorise as ‘expansionary’ RTAs, ‘duplicate’ RTAs or ‘overlapping’ RTAs. We find that countries excluded from an RTA can benefit more from duplicating a separate RTA than from joining an existing RTA. This result explains why the number of bilateral trade blocs, rather than the membership size of existing RTAs, is currently exploding. We also find that the net trade‐creating effects of RTAs are substantially lower for countries participating in overlapping RTAs. This result suggests that it is less likely that the currently proliferating RTAs will completely merge and lead the world economy to global free trade. Our empirical results are robust to controlling for the characteristics of countries that may influence the impact of RTAs.     

The Performance of Trading Firms in the Services Sectors – Comparable Evidence from Four EU Countries

We examine trade complexity and the implications of adding additional dimensions of trade for firm performance among services producers. We use unique firm‐level data to compare these patterns across four EU countries. Overall, services firms are relatively less engaged in trade than manufacturing firms; they mostly trade goods and are more likely to import than to export. Trade in services is quite rare; services are more likely to be traded by firms already trading goods. Trading firms in the services sectors are significantly larger, more productive and pay higher wages than non‐traders. Two‐way traders outperform one‐way traders. Changes in trading status by either adding another dimension of trade (imports, exports) or another type of product (goods, services) are infrequent and are associated with significant preswitching premia. In contrast, learning effects from switching trading status are uncommon. This points to significant fixed cost of being engaged in trade and confirms some previous findings that trading services firms have similar traits as their manufacturing counterparts. Apart from greater trade participation in smaller countries, we do not observe systematic differences in terms of trade or switching premia between the four countries that might be attributable to differences in country characteristics.     

Time,uncertainty and trade flows

This paper quantifies the impact of international transport time on bilateral trade flows in goods using previously unexploited information drawn from a large data set on international parcel delivery times. In line with previous work, we find that an extra day spent in international transit reduces bilateral trade by just under 1% at the sample median. In addition, and for the first time in the literature, we examine the impact of time-related uncertainty, which requires traders to hold costly inventories or build costly redundancies into supply chains. We find that a one day increase in international transport time uncertainty reduces bilateral trade flows by just over 1%. Splitting the sample into developing and developed countries shows that international transit time matters primarily for south–south trade, whereas uncertainty is relatively more important for north–north trade. Using new data on trade in intermediate versus final goods, we also find some evidence that time and uncertainty both matter more for movements of intermediates of the type that takes place within global value chains.     

Behavior of output during currency crises

This paper documents the behavior of output and its association with other macroeconomic variables in 195 episodes of currency crises in developing countries during 1970-2000. We find that about 60% of the crises are contractionary, while the rest are expansionary. Crises are one and a half times more likely to be contractionary in emerging markets than in other developing economies. The number of contractionary crises or their severity does not increase in the 1990s. Economies which experience capital inflows in the years prior to the crisis or an increase in external debt burden during the crisis are more likely to slow down during crises, while those with restrictions on capital flows prior to the crisis or are more open to international trade are less likely to do so. The results are robust to different ways of measuring changes in output during crises.     

Impact of Environmental Regulations on Trade in the Main EU Countries: Conflict or Synergy?

In an increasingly integrated world with declining trade barriers, environmental regulations can have a decisive role in shaping countries’ comparative advantages. The conventional wisdom about environmental protection is that it comes at an additional cost on firms imposed by the government, which may erode their global competitiveness. However, this paradigm has been challenged by some analysts. In particular, Porter and van der Linde argue that pollution is often associated with a waste of resources and that more stringent environmental policies can stimulate innovations that may overcompensate for the costs of complying with these policies. This is known as the Porter hypothesis. While there is a broad empirical literature on the impact of trade on environment, the empirical literature on the impact of environmental regulations on trade flows is relatively scarce, very heterogeneous and presents mixed results. The innovative feature of this paper is its attempts to estimate, in a gravity setting, augmented with a proxi of environmental stringency, the impact of three major multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) on 15 EU countries’ bilateral exports. According to our estimates, in the period 1988–2008, to be member of MEAs had a positive average impact on EU‐15 bilateral exports. This evidence can be partly explained by a possible trade diversion effect with respect to countries that did not sign MEAs and a corresponding trade creation effect among members of the environmental agreements. Furthermore, evidence coming from interaction effects estimates seems to show that for exporting countries, having signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Montreal agreements partly mitigates (by the amount of the estimated coefficient) the negative impact of having a relatively more stringent environmental regulation on bilateral trade. This result could have important policy implications for the future international trade–environmental negotiations.     

Market access implications of non‐tariff measures: Estimates for four developed country markets

We quantify the effects of non‐tariff measures on the extensive margin of trade, examining the number of countries exporting particular products to Canada, the European Union, New Zealand and the United States. We find that non‐tariff measures that impose a conformity requirement, that is, testing, certification or inspection, will reduce the number of countries exporting to these markets. Conformity requirements imposed for sanitary or phytosanitary reasons have the largest effect in Canada, reducing the number of exporting countries by 47% compared to the situation where no compliance requirement is imposed. Conformity requirements imposed for other reasons covered by the WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade have the largest effect in Canada and New Zealand, reducing the number of exporting countries by 27% compared to the situation where no compliance requirement is imposed. However, we generally find a statistically significant positive effect for nontariff measures that do not impose a compliance burden, suggesting that such measures may facilitate trade.     

Optimum tariffs and retaliation: How country numbers matter

This paper identifies a new terms-of-trade externality that is exercised through tariff setting. A North-South model of international trade is introduced in which the number of countries in each region can be varied. As the number of countries in one region is increased, each government there competes more aggressively with the others in its region, by lowering its tariff, to attract imports from the other region. In doing so, all countries in a region exert a negative terms-of-trade externality on each other, collectively undermining their own terms of trade and welfare. This externality can increase efficiency if the numbers of countries in both regions are increased simultaneously.     

卫生和植物检疫措施影响农产品贸易的理论模型--以猪肉为例

本文从卫生和植物检疫(SPS)措施导致的遵从成本出发,建立了经济学局部均衡分析模型,研究SPS措施对中国猪肉贸易的影响效应。分析表明:SPS措施对猪肉贸易的影响在宏观上表现为贸易禁止、贸易限制和贸易扭曲。微观上的影响在短期和长期是不同的。文章还分析了在一对一歧视、多对一歧视和非歧视情况下遵从成本的大小。研究发现,当所有进口国对所有出口国无歧视的采用同一SPS措施的情况下,遵从成本被各国分摊,对于单个出口国来说,这时遵从成本最低。因此,对于贸易商来说,最重要的是追求贸易中的公平待遇。     

发达国家反倾销的动因:供给角度的分析

发达国家一直将反倾销作为最重要的贸易保护政策之一,它们也是世界上最主要的反倾销措施的使用者。文章从供给的角度探讨了发达国家大量使用反倾销的原因,认为宏观经济失衡的常态是政府供给反倾销政策的外部动因,追求自身政治利益最大化是政府供给反倾销政策的内部动因,而反倾销相对于保障措施和反补贴的政治成本最小决定了政府必然偏好于使用反倾销。     

Anti‐dumping duty circumvention through trade rerouting: Evidence from Chinese exporters

We study the evasion of US anti‐dumping duties by some Chinese exporters through trade rerouting via third countries or regions. Using detailed monthly trade data reported by China and the US Customs during the period of 2002–06, we find that US anti‐dumping actions against China lead to a stronger positive correlation between US imports from third countries and Chinese exports to the same third countries. Such a positive correlation is more pronounced for the products subject to anti‐dumping duties (treatment groups) than similar products not subject to these duties (control groups). The evidence is stronger for less‐differentiated products whose certificates of origins are easier to be modified and is stronger for third countries where the rerouting cost is low. These findings are consistent with a trade rerouting story, rather than a simple story of trade diversion (i.e., increase in some third countries' imports from China) and trade deflection (i.e., increase in some third‐country exports to the US). We also rule out other alternative stories, consider prior production in third countries and concurrent anti‐dumping actions against China or third countries, pay a particular attention to the many zero trade flows in the monthly level data and check the robustness to using an alternative control group and quarterly data, etc.     

The increased use of trade controls by the industrial countries

The increase in non-tariff barriers to trade in the industrial countries has given rise to much concern. This article attempts to summarize the formal non-tariff measures that have been introduced by the industrial countries to measure roughly how much trade is now affected by them.     

中国与中东欧16国贸易效率和潜力研究——基于非效率项随机前沿引力模型

贸易效率和贸易潜力是衡量国际贸易有效程度、确定未来贸易发展方向的重要指标。基于非效率项随机前沿引力模型,分别在"16+1"和"16+1+10"背景下测算了中国与中东欧16国的贸易效率和潜力,结果表明:中国与中东欧国家的双边贸易效率较高,但贸易潜力不显著;中国对中东欧国家的出口贸易效率低于双边贸易效率,出口贸易潜力超过双边贸易潜力;出口贸易潜力在"16+1+10"背景下较"16+1"背景下有显著提高。由此,提出进一步落实"16+1"合作机制、扩大进口、改进交通运输设施的建议,以期实现贸易潜力,提高贸易效率。     

Trade and imperfect competition in general equilibrium

This paper employs a multi-industry general equilibrium model of oligopolistic competition, free market entry and trade in which capital is used to establish firms and labor is used for production. We show that both absolute and relative endowments matter for the pattern of trade. We demonstrate that market entry to each industry is either too excessive or too moderate while the effect on firm size is ambiguous. If countries are sufficiently symmetric, trade will increase the wage–rental ratio in both countries. Furthermore, trade will increase per-capita consumption in capital-intensive industries and reduce it in labor-intensive industries. Nevertheless, trade will be mutually welfare-improving under relatively mild conditions.