A Systematic Decomposition of World Trade into Horizontal and Vertical IIT

We provide a systematic decomposition of world trade using harmonized bilateral flows at the most available detail (some 5,000 product categories), into three trade types: inter-industry, intra-industry in horizontally and in vertically differentiated products. The analysis is diachronic and considers country pairs such as France-Germany, United States-China, Malaysia-Singapore, or India-Nigeria. We show that the increase in IIT at the world level is due to two-way trade of vertically differentiated products. We find France and Germany having the highest share of IIT in their bilateral trade among all country pairs in the world. In value terms, the most important bilateral IIT is between the United States and Canada. Recently, specialization according to the classical theories of international trade (inter-industry trade), has recovered, due to the increasing participation of emerging economies in world trade. JEL no. F14, F15     

Elicitation of Expert Opinion in Benefit Transfer of Environmental Goods

Benefit transfer is a method for estimating the value of environmental goods that involves the use of past information on identical or similar goods. This paper considers the extent to which benefit transfer can be based on prior distributions elicited from expert opinion. We propose two alternative methods to elicit the parameters of a prior distribution from experts on environmental valuation. An experiment is carried out on the value of National Parks in Spain. The results from the elicited distributions are compared with the information provided by onsite samples of visitors. The results indicate that individual experts made different predictions about the potential value of the policy areas that were diverse and unable to accurately predict the value for each policy site. However, the average across the elicited distributions approaches the estimated distribution with empirical data and accurately predicts the relative values for the two policy sites considered.     

Optimal tax auditing when some individuals need not file

In a situation in which people who are required to fill in a tax-return coexist with tax-return-exempt people, we prove that the optimal audit policy leads to different tax compliance behavior, depending on the difficulty of detecting an evader who does not fill in a tax return, passing himself of as a non-taxpayer.     

收入水平对居民保险消费的影响研究--基于65个国家(或地区)的实证分析

实证分析表明,人均收入水平较低和较高的国家(或地区),居民的边际保险消费倾向较低,而人均收入水平居中的国家(或地区),居民的边际保险消费倾向较高。这一结论,对于扩大我国居民当前的保险消费具有重要的启示。