U.S. Antidumping Enforcement and Macroeconomic Indicators Revisited: Do Petitioners Learn?

We contribute to the literature on the political economy of U.S. antidumping enforcement through an analysis of the pattern—and macroeconomic determinants—of country-specific antidumping petitions filed by U.S. firms against 15 countries between 1981 and 1998 (examining quarterly data). We reconcile some seemingly inconsistent results from the prior literature by suggesting that “learning” by petitioners about the administration—in practice—of the U.S. trade laws has led to changes in the roles of the macroeconomic determinants over time. JEL no. F13     

世界经济再平衡和美国套利

美国次贷危机引发了席卷全球的金融危机,长期的低利率货币政策和赤字财政政策是引发美国次贷危机的主要原因。贸易保护和美元贬值将是美国未来减少贸易赤字和刺激经济复苏的重要政策取向,在所谓世界经济"再平衡"过程中美国将会实现双向套利。作为持有大量美元外汇资产的美国最大逆差国,中国应该保持人民币与美元汇率的稳定,逐步减持美元债券,加快生产与贸易结构调整,推动国际经济体制和国际金融体系的改革。     

The demographics of trade-affected services and manufacturing workers (1987–1990): A comparative analysis

Using input-output data for 1987 and 1990, this study identifies the demographic characteristics of trade-affected workers in U.S. manufacturing and service industries. Trade-affected workers are defined as employees in industries that experienced a change (positive or negative) in net total (direct and indirect) trade-related employment between 1987 and 1990. For the period 1987–1990, three industry categories were examined: (a) industries that experienced an increase in positive net trade-related employment; (b) industries that experienced a decline in positive net trade-related employment; and (c) industries that suffered net trade-related employment losses in both years yet experienced an improvement over the period. The study finds that, while manufacturing industry workers in the most favorably affected industry group (i.e., group “a”) were more likely to be highly skilled (i.e., scientists & engineers), highly educated (i.e., over four years of college education), unionized, married and white males, corresponding service sector workers were predominantly unskilled (laborers), less educated, non-unionized, young (i.e., aged 16–24) and male (black and white). Furthermore, the service sector was associated with greater mean trade-related employment and output gains and lower mean employment and output losses than was the manufacturing sector. This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Western Economic Association Internationale 69th Annual Conference, Vancouver, British Columbia.     

Labour-market effects of intra-industry trade: Evidence for the United Kingdom

Labor-Market Effects of Intra-Industry Trade: Evidence for the United Kingdom. — According to the “smooth adjustment hypothesis”, the labor-market adjustment costs entailed by trade liberalization are lower if trade expansion is intra-industry rather than inter-industry in nature. In this paper, we study the link between trade and labor market changes in UK manufacturing industries during the 1980s. We use industry-level measures of unemployment duration and wage variability as proxies for adjustment costs, and we relate them to various measures of intra-industry trade. Our evidence offers some support for the smooth adjustment hypothesis.     

Poverty and protectionism

The United States had a trade deficit of $170 billion in 1987 and, even though the value of the dollar has been declining, the deficit has shown no consistent pattern of improvement. The magnitude and persistence of the trade imbalance has led to a great deal of discussion of its impact on the U.S. economy and of policies that might be used to correct the imbalance. One major consideration that is often overlooked is the distributional and equity effect of the trade situation on the poor. While some advocates embrace protectionist policies as a means of “saving” jobs for low-income Americans, others argue that these measures raise the cost of goods used by the poor with no guarantee that jobs are actually saved. The following article reviews the available evidence on the position of low-income Americans under a policy of protectionism.     

Big philanthropy and the funding of black organizations

Conclusion The general overview of foundation giving to promote black interests and the specific look at the Ford-MARC relationship support the notion that few foundation grants will go to “controversial” or “political” projects. The Peterson Commission estimated that only three percent of all private foundation grants are “innovative” and an even smaller percentage are “politically controversial.” Most often, these projects usually become controversial after the grant is made. A 1971 Urban League study revealed that grants for human services made by private foundations to black and Spanish-speaking communities were disproportionately low when measured in terms of the per capita needs of the minority population. Nevertheless, it is unrealistic to expect Ford, Rockefeller Brothers, Mott, or Carnegie to redistribute income or become the “cutting edge of social change”.     

Stabilization and Association Agreements (SAAs), Europe Agreements,and Public Procurement

This paper initially presents Stabilization and Association Agreements (SAAs) provisions in terms of trade openness to the EC competition. It also makes reference to Europe Agreements (EUs) provision in this matter. It aims more precisely at specifying the impact of public procurement provisions of those Agreements to five Western Balkan public procurement markets. Combining the extent of “Buy National” policies within these countries, with information on the current international competitiveness, the paper identifies those industries that are likely to be particularly sensitive to the abolition of “Buy National” practices due to the provisions of the SAAs. These results can help national authorities overcome part of the negative impacts due to the EU competition.     

Controversies on market failure in rewarding inventors

Conclusions A definite answer to the question of whether inventors are over-compensated cannot be attained within a model of an “ideal” market economy. Our analysis, however, yields informations about the conditions which determine an inventor's reward: When constant returns to scale are prevailing in the economy (models 2, 4), we can expect that compensations for inventions are effiecient or too small. Under decreasing returns (model 5), an inventor’s reward may be either too large or too small. But overcompensation — when it occurs — can never be larger than the sum of all producers’ surpulses (model 1). Thus, profits from inventions may be large, but not excessive.     

Natural resources and non-cooperative trade policy

When looking at the conditions of trade in natural resources the world appears upside down: tariff protection in natural resources sectors is generally lower than for overall merchandise trade, while export restrictions are twice as likely as in other sectors. On the other hand, tariff escalation is significant in natural resources sectors, where materials in their raw state face, on average, lower duties than in their processed form. In this paper, we discuss how export taxes and tariff escalation may be the result of an uncooperative trade policy. Specifically, tariff escalation and export taxes can be “beggar-thy-neighbor” policies because governments may be tempted to use them to alter the relative price of exports to their advantage (terms-of-trade effect) or to expand the domestic processing industry at the expenses of foreign production (production relocation effect). In equilibrium, these policies offset each other in a Prisoners’ Dilemma situation, where trade is inefficiently low.     

Do exchange rate changes have symmetric or asymmetric effects on the trade balance? Evidence from U.S.–Korea commodity trade

Previous studies of the effects of exchange rate changes on Korea’s trade balance have assumed symmetry between currency depreciation and appreciation. In this paper, we distinguish between the two to show that the effects at the industry level are in fact asymmetrical in most industries for Korea’s bilateral trade with the U.S. We employ an auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach using quarterly data for the period 1989–2014 for the 79 3-digit industries in which trade between Korea and the U.S. took place. Overall, our model incorporating differentiated responses for appreciation versus depreciation reveals a more significant impact of the exchange rate on commodity trade between Korea and the U.S. than a more standard model that imposes symmetry.     

Tariff protection and workforce gender: Evidence from U.S. manufacturing industries

A data set of 266 four-digit SIC U.S. manufacturing industries is used to examine the relationship between tariff protection and workforce gender. The paper shows that industries with a relatively large proportion of women are more likely to be protected by U.S. tariff policy, even when factors such as wages and human capital are controlled. Furthermore, this result is robust in that it is not driven by any particular industry or industries.     

The Link Between CEO Compensation and Firm Performance: Does Simultaneity Matter?

In order to combat the principle-agent problem, directors of public companies use incentive-based contracts to align the interests of CEOs and shareholders. Some studies suggest that these contracts are an inefficient use of resources, and that they do not motivate CEOs to do what is best for the firm. In this study, the author estimates a regression to find the relationship between CEO Compensation and market value of a firm. In order to address persistence, endogeneity and firm-specific effects the author uses the first-differenced and system GMM regression techniques first used by [Arellano, M.; Bover, O. “Another Look at the Instrumental-Variable Estimation of Error-Component Models,” Journal of Econometrics, 68, 1995, pp. 29–51] and [Blundell, R. W.; Bonds, S. R. “Initial Conditions and Moment Restrictions in Dynamic Panel Data Models,” Journal of Econometrics, 87, 1998, pp. 115–43; Blundell, R. W.; Bond, S. R., Windmeijer, F. “Estimation in Dynamic Panel Data Models: Improving on the Performance of the Standard GMM Estimators,” Institute for Fiscal Studies Working Paper W00/12, London, England, 2000]. These regressions report a positive relationship between CEO compensation and market value of a firm. This study concludes that incentive based contracts are effective, due to the positive pay-to-performance link, when controlling for simultaneity. First place winner of the Undergraduate Best Paper Award Competition at the 60th International Atlantic Economic Conference in New York, NY, October 6–9, 2005.     

产业地理与贸易决策——理解中美贸易战的微观逻辑

2018年开始,美国对华发起规模空前的贸易战,具体内容主要包括“关税战”和“技术战”两个方面。贸易战在美国国内引发了明显的利益分化,利益受损方及其在政治体系中的代表力量成为特朗普政府与中国达成贸易协议以在某种程度上减弱贸易战烈度甚至结束贸易战的主要动力。由于美国的产业呈现高度的地理集聚特征,在中美贸易战中利益受到损失的产业最终会通过它们所在选区的政治代言人来表达自身的利益诉求,因此,理解美国产业地理政治的基本特征是理解中美贸易战进程中两国变换采取攻守策略的逻辑基础。作者认为,以产业集中分布为特征的产业地理和以选区为中心的政治地理是理解美国社会利益和政策偏好向联邦政府传导的两把“钥匙”,它们共同构成了塑造联邦政府对华贸易政策的微观利益基础和核心动力机制。由于受损者比获益者更有动力站出来表达利益诉求以影响政府决策,作者在实证部分集中关注美国对华货物出口行业的产业地理政治,分析中美贸易战中美国国内潜在的反对力量,进而为有针对性地制定对美反制措施提出政策建议。     

A Primer on Real Effective Exchange Rates: Determinants, Overvaluation, Trade Flows and Competitive Devaluation

Several alternative measures of “effective” exchange rates are discussed in the context of their theoretical underpinnings and construction. Focusing on contemporary indices and recently-developed econometric methods, the empirical characteristics of these differing series are examined for the U.S., the euro area, and several East Asian countries. The issues that confront the applied economist or policymaker in using the measures of real effective exchange rates available are illustrated in several case studies from current interest: (i) evaluating exchange rate misalignment; (ii) testing the Balassa-Samuelson effect; (iii) estimating the price responsiveness of trade flows; and (iv) assessing the potential impact of competitive devaluations. JEL Classification Numbers: F31, F41     

Regional integration in East Asia. From market-driven regionalisation to institutionalised regionalism?

Conclusions The analyses have shown that ESACs unprecedented emergence in world trade and capital transactions has been accompanied by a growing share of intra-area transactions. At least for the goods sector, the evidence is clear. Intra-area transactions grew faster than those to the rest of world, and the latter rose faster than world trade. Given this “double growth” performance, there was no trade diversion in the static zero sum meaning. Driving forces of fast growing intra-area transactions were basically internal conditions, such as “natural” trading partnership (geographical and cultural proximity, size, and complementarity in resource endowment and production structure), rising income levels fostering intra-industry trade, the economic opening of China, and unilateral liberalisation of trade and capital transactions on a non-discriminatory basis. It cannot be denied that external factors as protectionism and recession in non-Asian OECD countries have also contributed to this performance. Yet, it seems safe to assume that even without the US and European recession in the early eighties and early nineties and without the spread on non-tariff barriers, intraarea transactions would have received sufficient fuels from the internal factors to grow more rapidly than transactions with the rest of the world.¹⁷ Furthermore, a base effect of a low initial level of intra-area trade cannot be neglected.     

产业国际转移视角下的中美贸易摩擦

文章认为,中美贸易逆差近年来大幅增长,在很大程度上是由于发达国家国内产业结构调整,将大量劳动密集型产业和资本技术密集型产业中的劳密型环节转移到中国,实际上等于是把东亚周边国家和地区以前对美、欧的顺差转变成中国对美、欧的顺差,将它们过去与美国的贸易摩擦转换成为中美贸易摩擦。为理顺中美经贸关系,应加快外贸发展方式的转变,坚持合作共赢的原则,大力推进走出去的战略和实施出口多元化战略。     

美国服务贸易的环境效应——以出口为例

本文以当今世界服务业发展水平最高的美国为例,在对跨境服务贸易和外国附属机构服务贸易分类比较的基础上,通过对2002年6种主要污染物的12个服务业部门的污染排放进行基于8个主要贸易伙伴的国别计算,横向比较美国服务出口对本国造成的环境影响,借此重新认识美国各服务业部门参与国际贸易的环境污染状况,在此基础上提出环保约束下美国调整服务业发展格局及优化对外服务贸易地理的若干政策建议。     

Exploring the Intensive and Extensive Margins of World Trade

World trade evolves at two margins. Where a bilateral trading relationship already exists it may increase through time (intensive margin). But trade may also increase if a trading bilateral relationship is newly established between countries that have not traded with each other in the past (extensive margin). We provide an empirical dissection of post–World War II growth in manufacturing world trade along these two margins. We propose a “corner-solutions version” of the gravity model to explain movements on both margins. A Tobit estimation of this model resolves the so-called “distance puzzle”. It also finds more convincing evidence than recent literature that WTO-membership enhances trade. JEL no. F12, F15     

基于森林资源投入的中美木质林产品贸易模式研究

木质林产品是典型的森林资源约束型产品,在中关木质林产品贸易中,家具占有举足轻重的地位。文章沿用古典贸易理论的思路,通过对中关木质家具与造纸业竞争态势的经验测算和分析,得出在以森林资源作为主要投入要素的木质林产品贸易上中国仍存在微弱比较优势,但同时也面临着生态陷阱的结论,并认为在全球经济可持续发展的背景下,各国应加强国际协调与合作．共同完善森林生态效益补偿机制,合理规划森林资源在不同产业间的分配和利用。