Greece’s Potential Trade Flows: A Gravity Model Approach

This paper attempts to access whether Greece’s low openness is a reflection of its low trade integration primarily as a result of the country’s relatively poor goods export performance. The analysis estimates potential trade flows for Greece through a gravity model using a panel of cross-country data, which cover bilateral trade flows concerning the EU member states. These flows are then derived by applying the estimated parameters to the Greek economy. The results show that actual Greek exports fall short of potential ones, while the opposite is true with respect to imports. This becomes more profound when the extent of intra-industry trade is included in the analysis. The findings for the Greek exports differ considerably from the corresponding ones for Portugal, a country with similar characteristics, manifesting the limited convergence of Greece’s trade patterns towards the EU average as well as its unique geographical location relatively to the other EU countries.

Do Preferential Rules of Origin Reverse Trade Creation and Trade Diversion?

Restrictive preferential rules of origin (PROOs) moderate the ‘trade diversion and trade creation’ effects of free trade agreements (FTAs). Moderation effects occur because restrictive PROOs reverse the increase in the relative price of non-member country goods initially caused by FTAs. Such a reversal arises because high compliance costs associated with restrictive PROOs lead to a lower utilization of tariff preferences by member countries. With a lower utilization, the increase in the relative price of non-members country goods would be smaller than it could have been with a full utilization. Thus, restrictive PROOs will lead to less than full trade diversion from non-members to member countries, and less than complete trade creation to member countries. This paper infers the effect of restrictive PROOs on intra-regional trade from the estimated parameters of the revenue function, on the presumption that trade diversion refers to a decrease in the elasticity of substitution between import sources, and that trade creation refers to a difference between the change in import price elasticity and the trade diversion effect. Empirical results support the conjecture that restrictive PROOs move in the opposite direction of FTAs partly undoing the trade diversion and trade creation effects of FTAs.     

Australian–Thai Trade: Has the Free Trade Agreement Made a Difference?

This article examines the impact of the Thailand–Australia Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) on bilateral trade between the two countries, paying attention to the implications of rules of origin and the utilisation of tariff preferences. It is found that trade has expanded faster since TAFTA came into effect, but the impact has heavily concentrated in a few product lines in Australian imports from Thailand, reflecting the influence of commodity‐specific, supply‐side factors which have a bearing on the rate of preference utilisation. The findings, inter alia, suggest that the use of officially announced preference rates in trade flow modelling is likely to exaggerate trade flow effects of free trade agreements.     

Does Financial Sector Development Augment Cross-Border Capital Flows?

ABSTRACT

The sharp increase in volatility of capital flows in recent years has resulted in many countries altering the regulations governing the flow of foreign capital only to find such changes having a limited impact. We postulate that one reason for the limited effectiveness of such changes in regulations is the level of financial sector development in the country. As a country enhances its level of financial sector development, it also develops more and more sophisticated financial instruments. The more advanced the domestic financial instruments are, and the deeper is the integration of the domestic financial markets with the world markets, the greater is the likelihood of developing strategies to bypass capital account management measures. In this paper, we use various empirical techniques to identify the impact of financial sector development on capital flows, after accounting for regulatory regime. The empirical results indicate that there is a threshold effect in the financial sector development capital flow relationship. In particular, financial sector development augments greater integration with global capital flows only above a threshold level. Below the threshold level we find financial development reduces the extent of integration with global capital markets.     

Does Trade Integration Contribute to Peace?

We investigate the effect of trade integration on interstate military conflict. Our empirical analysis, based on a large panel data set of 243,225 country‐pair observations from 1950 to 2000, confirms that an increase in bilateral trade interdependence significantly promotes peace. It also suggests that the peace‐promotion effect of bilateral trade integration is significantly higher for contiguous countries that are likely to experience more conflict. More importantly, we find that not only bilateral trade but global trade openness also significantly promotes peace. It shows, however, that an increase in global trade openness reduces the probability of interstate conflict more for countries far apart from each other than it does for countries sharing borders. The main finding of the peace‐promotion effect of bilateral and global trade integration holds robust when controlling for the simultaneous determination of trade and peace.     

The Economic Growth with the Flows of Capital ＆ Technology

The difference of regional economy comes from capital dissymmetry, technology dissymmetry, manpower dissymmetry and the information dissymmetry. In the knowledge-based economic ages, globalization and information exceed any age of the history. It provides the new terrace for the balanced development of global economy. The flows of capital and technology improve the regional dissymmetry of production factor. By establishing circulating channels, the flows of the production factor will be enlarged. This will raise the distribution efficiency of global resources and lead to the global economic growth.     

Fare Well,Free Trade北大核心CSSCISSCI

The Economist, December 18, 2008 This Christmas the world economy offers few reasons for good cheer. As credit contracts and asset prices plunge,demand across the globe is shrivelling.Rich countries collectively face the severest recession since the second     

Liberalization of Foreign Trade Activities After Ten Years

On April 6th, 2004. the Standing Committee of the People‘s Congress ratified the modifiedforeign trade law which comes into effect on July 1st this year and coincides with the effective date of the original foreign trade law of ten years ago.     

Can Trade Be Good for the Environment?

We analyze the impact of trade in a differentiated good on environmental policy when there is local and transboundary pollution. In autarky, the (equivalent) pollution tax is set equal to the marginal damage from own emissions. If the strategic policy instrument is a tax, leakage occurs under trade and tends to lower the tax. The net terms of trade effect, due to the exportable and importable varieties of the differentiated good, tends to increase the tax. We derive conditions under which pollution taxes under trade are higher than the marginal damage from own emissions, i.e., higher than the Pigouvian tax and than that under autarky. Then, pollution falls under trade relative to autarky. When countries use quotas/permits to regulate pollution, there is no leakage, while the net terms of trade effect tends to make pollution policy stricter. The equivalent tax is always higher than the marginal damage from own emissions, i.e., always higher than the Pigouvian tax and than that under autarky; hence, pollution always falls under trade. Our analysis provides some insight into the findings in the empirical literature that trade might be good for the environment.     

The Empirical Analysis of China International Capital Flows＇ Effective Factors

采用加权最小二乘法对我国国际资本流动与影响因素之间进行回归估计,并运用平稳性检验和协整检验方法验证结果的准确性,根据研究发现,国家开放程度是影响中国国际资本流动最重要的因素,其次为国家政策和汇率状况,中国国际资本流动是综合因素作用的结果。     

Comments on “Consumption Values of Trade Unions”

The credit default swap (CDS) is implicated in the global financial crises because a vast market for securities collateralized by subprime mortgages and consumer debt could not have materialized if hedge funds and other holders of these instruments lacked a means of hedging default "risk." The argument is made that the CDS is an inherently defective concept because it is based on the assumption that future states of the economy are subject to probabilistic risk as opposed to uncertainty in the Keynes-Knight-Shackle-Davidson sense. The CDS also manifests the paradox of derivatives. By enabling individual money managers to safely increase leverage, it causes a system-wide buildup of leverage and financial fragility.     

Trade Restrictiveness and Deadweight Loss in China’s Imports

China is believed to have gained immensely from its admission into to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. One of the direct gains comes from the lessening of deadweight loss (DWL) due to tariff reduction. Conventional measures for DWL, however, are too aggregate to capture the trade policies, which are determined at a much higher disaggregated level, and ignore the interactions between tariff and corresponding import demand as suggested by theories. In this paper, we first systematically estimate the import demand elasticities at a highly disaggregated level and then match them with the most detailed lines of the applied tariff for the most favored nations as reported by the WTO. Using the detailed matching data, we construct Feenstra’s (1995) simplified trade restrictiveness index (TRI), which captures the covariance of tariff and the corresponding demand elasticity. Finally, we use the TRI to compute the DWL from1997 to 2008 and find that the DWL due to the tariff barrier was reduced to 0.73% of GNI in 2008, noticeably lower than the highest previous mark of 4.58% of GNI in 2001.     

Trade and unemployment: What do the data say?

This paper documents a robust empirical regularity: in the long-run, higher trade openness is associated with a lower structural rate of unemployment. We establish this fact using: (i) panel data from 20 OECD countries, (ii) cross-sectional data on a larger set of countries. The time structure of the panel data allows us to control for unobserved heterogeneity, whereas cross-sectional data make it possible to instrument openness by its geographical component. In both setups, we purge the data of business cycle effects, include a host of institutional and geographical variables, and control for within-country trade. Our main finding is robust to various definitions of unemployment rates and openness measures. Our benchmark specification suggests that a 10 percentage point increase in total trade openness reduces aggregate unemployment by about three quarters of one percentage point.     

Trade flows: a facet of regionalism or globalisation?

This paper examines the evidence about the extent of globalisationby focusing on some aspects of international trade flows. Areinterpretation of the existing evidence based on the analysisof tables and a range of indicators is provided in the firstpart of the paper. The focus is on whether the increase in tradeflows has been predominantly a global or regional phenomenon.The analysis points to the tentative conclusion that the dominanttendency is the increase in trade within regional blocs (NorthAmerica, the EU and the Asia–Japan blocs) rather thanacross them. To address the same question, a more formal analysisis undertaken in the second part of the paper, by focusing onthe relative speed of the convergence in openness within andacross regions of the world. Our results indicate that the degreeof openness converges faster across the countries of a givenregion rather than at the global level, reinforcing the conclusionsfrom the first part of the paper. The results are consistentwith the view that trade integration is more of a ‘regional’phenomenon than a ‘global’ one.     

New ideas on China＇s Foreign Trade Development Strategy

China has been a leader in export strategy since the reform and opening-up for trade. This has played a positive role in economic development, however, since stepping into a large country economy, entering the.WTO and the current development of economic globalization at a rapid rate, the leading export strategy has already been very difficult to adapt to the daily challenges in export because of the constant changes in domestic and international economic environment. In view of this, China should turn its strategy into one of dynamic comparative advantages with a global competitive strategy, in conformity with big country＇s economy in the economic background of globalization.     

Trade Politics： A Brief Survey of International Political Economy

International political economy has already been shown to be powerful to explain the global trade growth. In this paper we offer a brief survey of international political economy of trade policy. In addition to this, we also try to address three questions： （1） How does electoral competition affect trade policy？ Suppose two parties compete for the power over trade policy, would the two parties choose the same tariff？. （2） We observe that the US tariffs decline over time, so do the declining U.S. tariffs lead to the fall of the Democratic vote share in the election？ （3） What is the relationship between trade globalization and political liberalization？ Put it another way, how does trade affect democracy？ And conversely, how does democracy affect trade？     

Trade with China: do the figures add up?

There are wide discrepancies in bilateral trade data compiled by China and by its trading partners, particularly the United States. This paper investigates the main reasons, notably the role of Hong Kong as an entrepôt, and develops a methodology to provide more accurate estimates for these trade flows. It extends the Sung—Lardy method in recent literature and achieves a reconciliation of the two data sets by China and by its major partners. The method recognizes that both the Chinese and the partners' data are likely to be distorted and demonstrates that a complete picture can he constructed by using data recorded from Hong Kong. A new estimate of the re-export margins in Hong Kong on Chinese exports is presented and used in the data reconciliation exercises, and problems of valuation and transit lag when comparing an export series with its counterpart import series are taken into account by the new method. The effects of using proved data are demonstrated in an application to examine fair market access in China—US bilateral trade undertaken by Tower (1993).