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The article announces that Denis Stijepic and Helmut Wagner have won the Best Paper prize for 2018 for the paper "Impacts of intermediate trade on sector structures."

Extant studies on the relationship between 'domestic institutions, comparative advantage, and international specialization' have primarily focused on formal institutions. This paper contributes to this literature by focusing on domestic informal contracting institutions vis-á-vis generalized trust as a source of comparative advantage. Employing a bilateral industry trade data, the paper finds robust evidence that countries with high generalized trust level export relatively more in industries that are prone to contractual frictions. Results on export margins further suggest that countries with a high generalized trust level enter more markets, ship more products to each destination, and have higher export per product and export intensities in those industries. On the one hand, the results reemphasize the importance of trust for improved economic performance. On the other hand, the results explain why a country endowed with weak formal domestic contracting institutions may still have a comparative cost advantage in contract intensive industries due to having strong domestic informal institutions such as generalized trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have shown that mergers and acquisitions (M&A) raise firms' productivity. Few researches investigate whether exporters can enhance export performance after M&A through higher levels of efficiency. Based on detailed information on M&A activities of Chinese firms, China's customs trade data and National Bureau of Statistics surveys, we investigate the causal effect of M&A on trade performance. In particular, the value and the volume of firm exports, product quality, product scope and the number of export destinations have been examined. We find positive and significant effects of M&A on all the examined indicators of export performance. These findings are generally robust to a variety of robustness checks. We further observe that state-owned firms are the least likely to benefit from M&A. We also obtain evidence that firms benefit more from M&A deals if they are targets or merge with foreign firms. Overall, this paper is to our knowledge the first study that uses micro-level data in multiple industries to examine the relationship between M&A and exports of heterogeneous firms. Our results deepen our understanding of the consequences of M&A by suggesting another potential benefit, and hence provide policy implications for merger regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the relative sophistication of the Korean export products in manufacturing industry both across and within products between 1989 and 2012 using the very detailed United States import data. I first compare Korea's export performance in the US market in terms of market share, product penetration and export similarity to those of its rival countries. Next, I propose far more extensive estimates of difference in export quality between Korea and its trading rivals. The estimated quality difference reveals substantial heterogeneity across products and countries. In particular, this paper shows that the current greatest competitor of Korea is still Japan in the US market, but China is steadily climbing up the quality ladder and is chasing after Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that the impact of import penetration on firms' productivity growth depends on firms' distance to the efficiency frontier and on product market regulation. Using firm-level data for a substantial number of OECD countries from the late 1990s to late 2000s, the analysis reveals nonlinear effects of both sectoral import penetration and de jure product market regulation measures, depending on firms' positions along the global distribution of productivity. Close to the technology frontier, import penetration has a strongly positive effect on firm-level productivity growth, with less stringent domestic regulation enhancing this effect substantially. However, far from the frontier, the effect of import penetration on firm-level productivity growth is much smaller and often not significant. Its interaction with domestic regulation generally has no statistically significant effect either. The heterogeneous effects of import penetration and domestic product market regulation on firm-level productivity growth are consistent with a neo-Schumpeterian view of trade and regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two main shortcomings flaw the estimation of gravity model in previous studies that examined the trade-creating effects of African Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs). First, these studies fail to account for the multilateral resistance term. This omission makes the estimates from standard gravity model bias and inconsistent. Second, there is a significant proportion of zero trade flows, however, these studies also fail to account for them properly. They use either the Tobit model or replace zero flows with arbitrary small values. Apart from these problems, they also exhibit considerable heterogeneity in the RTA effects on trade. In this paper, a meta-analysis of previous empirical studies is conducted to derive a combined effect size and also to explain the heterogeneity. In addition, I use the gravity model to compare the trade-creating effect of the main African RTAs. Using the gravity model, I compare the estimation methods of previous studies to the Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood estimator that tackles the zero flows. From the meta-analysis, I find a general positive effect of African RTAs of about 27%–32%. A comparative assessment of the RTAs using gravity model shows a striking heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the economic impacts of China–US trade tensions. A global value chains-augmented global vector autoregressive trade model that gauges the spatial and temporal dynamics of international transmission of economy-specific trade policy shock across economies is employed. Trade tensions are found to have both real and financial effects on individual economies. Results lend support to the thesis that international trade is a positive-sum game in the world trading system characterized by global value chains. The US restrictive trade policy is counter-productive to the US economy by worsening its trade imbalances. Redirection of investment from China may be limited given the contemporary world economy characterized by global value chain production networks. Economies from different regional economic groups and with different trade balance positions are heterogeneously affected. As a whole, trade protectionism is detrimental to the economic well-being of the world economy by shrinking international trade, reducing output, curbing investment and plummeting stock prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the role of unconditional cash transfers in helping smallholders' commercialization by overcoming barriers to trade from transaction costs. We use data from a controlled experiment for the evaluation of the Child Grant model in Zambia. We employ a Heckman model that allows us to capture the effects of the program on the propensity to engage in trade in both inputs and outputs markets as well as on the value of trade. The cash transfer program contributes significantly to increase farmers' commercialization. The program produced greater benefits for those households that face more binding transaction costs from transportation and information gathering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances and empirically tests the hypothesis that trade raises input-oriented technical efficiency through cost saving practices that reduce cost inefficiencies. Using a primal and dual True-Fixed-Effects (TFE) stochastic frontier approach on a panel dataset comprising 28 manufacturing industries in South Africa between 1970 and 2016 at 3-digit level, it found average technical and cost efficiency values of 0.83 and 0.33 respectively indicating that the industries operated 33% above their cost minimising level and could have reduced their input usage by 17% without compromising their output level. Empirical findings then confirmed a significant positive effect of import penetration and export intensity on technical efficiency that operates through reduction of cost inefficiencies. These findings do not only support our proposed hypothesis; they also corroborate the idea that competition from global trade forces local industries to rationalise their operations and give up production practices that are not consistent with the cost minimisation objective. The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) might find these results useful as they suggest that a less restrictive trade policy that promotes exports and imports has the potential to improve resource utilisation within the manufacturing sector through downward cost adjustments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South Asian countries formed the regional trade bloc namely South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) with the aim to promote regional economic cooperation through multilateral engagements. India which comes to be the largest economy in the SAARC has posted impressive economic growth in the last decades. As of now India stands major contributor to the exports and imports to/from South Asia, having trade surplus with all other countries from the region. In this backdrop, this paper presents the facts on India's role in the economic development of South Asia region while testing the potential spillovers of India's trade and economic growth. We utilize Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bound test procedure for short and long run causal relations during the period 1990–2016, hence raising the quality of statistical inference. The results highlight that the economic growth and regional trade of India are found significant short and long run spillovers on the economic growth of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan. The results are highly insightful for policy implication which raises the attention towards the greater degree of trade openness for balanced economic development in the region. India can act as engine of growth, and thus requires to play key role in pushing forward the SAARC objectives through political and diplomatic engagements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a large body of literature examines the environmental impact of trade on the environment, this discussion focuses largely on the context of inter-industry trade. Empirical evidence has long suggested that an increasing share of international trade takes the form of intra- rather than inter-industry trade. In an attempt to fill this gap, the present paper uses a price-setting duopoly model of intra-industry trade to highlight the environmental consequences of trade liberalization when oligopolistic rivalry rather than comparative advantage drives international trade. We find that the environmental impact of trade liberalization depends mostly on two factors, namely, on the nature of pollution (i.e. whether it is local, transboundary or global) and on which country liberalizes trade (i.e. whether it is the ‘clean’ country or the ‘dirty’ country). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adds a new perspective to the literature of monetary standard by establishing a link between re-exports and the choice of nominal anchor. The model developed is applied to address the controversy over the US dollar versus the renminbi as the nominal anchor for Hong Kong, in the context of its considerable amount of entrepôt trade with the US and China. It is found that the distinct trade structure of the US–Hong Kong–China triangle significantly reduces Hong Kong's opportunity cost of choosing between the two currencies, its nominal anchor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the studies that have tested the Orcutt's hypothesis in trade have used aggregate trade data between one country and rest of the world. Since these studies suffer from aggregation bias, three recent studies have employed data at commodity level and have found relatively more support for the hypothesis. In this paper we test the hypothesis using commodity level data from 54 industries that trade between Turkey and the US. We find support for the notion that trade flows respond to exchange rate changes faster than to relative price changes in one-third of the industries, supporting Orcutt's conjecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore how public investment in commercial infrastructure affects the composition of trade between countries. To this end, we develop a model of bilateral trade in which two countries produce, consume, and trade a continuum of goods. Goods are produced by a single homogeneous factor, labor, the productivity of which depends on the quality of the country's commercial infrastructure, broadly conceived to encompass transportation, communication, and power transmission networks; regulatory and legal institutions; and basic research and educational systems. Countries may improve the quality of their commercial infrastructures through increased public investment. However, returns on these investments are constrained by fixed 'natural' endowments, with the better-endowed country enjoying greater labor productivity for a given level of public investment. We begin by analyzing optimal investment in public infrastructure in one country when public investment by the trading partner is fixed. We find that, ceteris paribus, greater public investment in commercial infrastructure raises general labor productivity, leading to gains in workers' real income. We then analyze a non-cooperative game in which both countries strategically vary public investment in commercial infrastructure. We find that, in a Nash game, the better-endowed country optimally spends more on infrastructure and produces the goods requiring the greatest labor productivity. However, in a Stackelberg game, the results are ambiguous. An empirical analysis based on recent international trade data supports our theoretical finding that investment in public infrastructure is positively related to the export of 'high-end' goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a standard trade model of a small open monetary economy with two traded and one non-traded goods. Money is introduced through a generalized cash-in-advance constraint where the share of goods purchases that must be made using cash, varies across sectors. We find that free trade may be harmful so that alternative policy instruments may be considered to improve welfare. In addition, we study and compare the optimal tariff formula and the optimal consumption tax structure. In the presence of a monetary distortion of the non-traded good, a consumption tax may not Pareto dominate a tariff although the latter bears an additional production burden. This corroborates the theory of second best. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By modeling an international industry where developed and developing countries' firms reciprocally trade differentiated goods under global pollution and the incomplete internalization of the pollution externality, we examine the firms' dumping and anti-dumping duty (ADD). We assume that the product quality, pollution emissions, and consumer's pollution internalization are worse in the developing country. We find, among others, that the developing country's firm always conducts dumping, but the developed country's firm only does so under a certain condition and that if the two countries' internalization degrees of the pollution externality are the same, the firms' dumping disappears, regardless of product qualities and units of pollution emissions. We also show that a rise in the developed (developing) country's ADD decreases (increases) global pollution and that a rise in a country's ADD always decreases its rival country's welfare, but there is the possibility that it also reduces its own welfare in a certain case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manufacturing sector has become increasingly important as the engine of growth in the external trade landscape in Malaysia. Meanwhile, most of the manufactured products are involved in intra-industry trade (IIT) and the past studies have documented that vertical intra-industry trade (VIIT) dominates IIT. Thus, using the panel autoregression (VAR) model, this study aims to shed light on the dynamic relationship between VIIT and economic size during 1988–2016 for the case of Malaysia and her top trading partners. The empirical results reveal positive bidirectional causality between VIIT and the economic size of the countries under study. This finding provides evidence that VIIT serves as the new strand of trades lending support to the trade-led growth hypothesis. Therefore, VIIT can act as an engine of growth for Malaysia in the short run. In addition, the findings imply that a shock to VIIT does not create chaos in Malaysia's economy. On the other hand, a positive shock to Malaysia's gross domestic product (GDP) increases the VIIT instantly and significantly. Overall, the empirical results suggest that Malaysia's policy makers should continue to focus on stimulating the growth of VIIT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study is to empirically explore the impact of trade openness on GDP growth initiating with the idea that trade openness cannot be fully characterized through the different openness measures only, we propose to account for total factor productivity (TFP) development level as an additional dimension of countries' trade integration. Our empirical application is based on 35 years' balanced panel of 82 countries spanning 1980–2014. To address the potential endogeneity issue, we use the system GMM estimator developed for dynamic panel data models. The results outline that there exists an interesting non-linear pattern between trade openness and GDP growth when TFP development level is taken as an intervening variable into account: trade may have a negative impact on GDP growth when countries have specialized in low-TFP development level; trade openness clearly boosts GDP growth once countries exhibit a minimum threshold of TFP development level. Therefore, there is some pattern of complementarity between trade openness and TFP development level so that the higher the TFP development level, the higher the impact of the trade openness on GDP growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite FTA, formed in 2011, is supposed to be a milestone towards Africa's continental trade integration. This study analyzes the impact of regional integration among the Tripartite countries on their bilateral imports before that date to evaluate the latest integration efforts. We estimate an extended gravity model on a large panel of 51 African countries using yearly observations from 1995 to 2010. We proxy existing formal trade barriers by sample average tariff data on imports from the world as well as indicator variables for the membership in regional FTAs. We consider different estimation techniques and discuss distinct sets of fixed effects. The PPML regression results indicate that remaining tariffs are significantly negatively correlated with imports throughout the preferred multiplicative models. An FTA status does not show a clear-cut import enhancing effect. In the specifications that control for country-year effects, the EAC coefficient is positively correlated with imports, and the COMESA and SADC FTA membership show a positive relation to imports within some reduced-sample robustness checks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) approach of Pesaran, Shin, and Smith [1999. "Pooled Mean Group Estimation of Dynamic Heterogeneous Panels." Journal of the American Statistical Association 94 (446): 621-634], this article attempts to empirically examine the heterogeneous effects of trade openness and urbanization on CO2 emissions in 55 middle-income countries over the period from 1992 to 2012. We find that trade openness has a benign effect on the environment in the short run, but a harmful effect in the long run. Meanwhile, our results show that urbanization has a negative and significant impact on CO2 emissions both in the short and long run, implying that urbanization improves environmental quality. The results are robust even after controlling for a number of factors such as economic or non-economic factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the relationship between trade and the quality of economic institutions under different political institutions. It uses panel data of 138 countries from 1984 to 2010 and employs instrumental variables and identification through heteroscedasticity to mitigate the problem of endogeneity. The findings suggest that the effect of trade on economic institutions reduces significantly in the presence of extractive political institutions. The findings indicate that ‘trade’ is not a sufficient tool for improving economic institutions; rather, trade policies need to be embedded in distinct political institutions to trigger the substantive improvement of economic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the concentration of foreign direct investment (FDI) in India at the district level, based on project-specific location choices since the reform program in the early 1990s. The decomposition property of the Theil index allows us to trace changes over time in the overall concentration of FDI to changes in concentration between and within subgroups of districts. We also differentiate between major types and sources of FDI. We find that FDI concentrated in a persistently decreasing number of districts. Concentration across those districts that received at least one FDI project within a given time interval also increased, but this increase leveled off in the more recent past. These trends hold for essentially all types and sources of FDI, while the average level of concentration varies considerably between these types and sources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We examine the effects of international trading activities of firms on creating productivity gains in Turkey by using a recent firm-level data set over the period 2003–2010. We establish treatment models and investigate the productivity improvements of firms through trade by using propensity score matching techniques together with difference-in-difference estimates. Three different groups of treatment are constructed: (1) firms that are involved only with import activities, (2) firms that are involved only with export activities and (3) firms that are involved with both export and import activities. The results of the study suggest that both exporting and importing have positive significant effects on total factor productivity (TFP) and labour productivity (LP) of firms. Importing is found to have a greater impact on productivity of firms compared to exporting. Further, two-way trade is found to have more significant effects than those of one-way trade on firm productivity. Finally, our results indicate that international trade has greater impact on LP rather than TFP of firms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the impacts of industrial agglomeration and outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) on the total factor productivity (TFP) of Taiwanese firms. A vertical FDI-based model of heterogeneous firms is proposed to analyze how agglomeration economies and technology incompatibilities between parent firms and their affiliates can affect firm productivity. This model suggests that firms located in areas with more concentrated industrial agglomerations are more productive, while those engaging in OFDI may not perform better in terms of TFP. Using plant-level data, this article constructs an indicator of industrial agglomeration to appraise agglomeration economies on firm productivity. Based on the data for 578 manufacturing firms and the agglomeration indicator, we estimate a cross-sectional econometric model to empirically assess the productivity effects of industrial agglomeration and OFDI. The empirical results show that local industrial agglomerations exert a positive contribution to firm productivity, but that FDI in China has no significant effects on Taiwanese firms' TFP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A model of trade with monopolistic competition is set up to explain unidirectional movements in skilled–unskilled wage differential observed in most parts of the world. With trade, an individual firm faces a higher number of competitors. This rise in the number of market participants requires each firm to spend higher amount of a skill intensive resource to survive in the global market consequently raising the relative demand for skilled labor and thereby increasing the skilled–unskilled wage ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a large cross-country sample of manufacturing establishments drawn from 188 cities, average exports per establishments are smaller for African firms than for businesses in other regions. Based on the estimation of firm level exporting equations, we show that this is mainly because, on average, African firms face more adverse economic geography and operate in poorer institutional settings. One part of the effect of geography operates through Africa's lower ‘foreign market access’: African firms are located further away from wealthier or denser potential export markets. A second occurs through the region's lower ‘supplier access’: African firms face steeper input prices, partly because of their physical distance from cheaper foreign suppliers, and partly because domestic substitutes for importable inputs are more expensive. Africa's poorer institutions reduce its manufactured exports directly, as well as indirectly, by lowering foreign market access and supplier access. Both geography and institutions influence average firm level exports significantly more through their effect on the number of exporters than through their impact on how much each exporter sells onto foreign markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]