Essays In Empirical International Trade

Internationalization of the world economy has made trade a key factor in the growth potential of nearly every economy. Hence, economists have become increasingly interested in the determinants of international trade and competitiveness. Empirical Models i

The essays of this book are contributions to the empirical Literature in International Trade and Public Economics. They deal with the relationship between the structure and quality of the public sector and the process of economic integration. Two of the essays add to the empirical determinants of trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) and to the numerous applications of the theory of government decentralization. Decentralization tends to discourage inward FDI and domestic trade and to increase imports and exports. A third essay focuses on the effect of governments' intangible assets - such as consumer perceptions about countries and products from these countries - on FDI. A country's nation brand is shown to have a significant and large positive effect on investment flows.

This book focuses on the normative side of trade theory and is divided into five parts: * trade under perfect competition; * restricted trade under perfect competition; * trade under imperfect competition and other distortions; * Compensation: lumpsum, non-lumpsum or neither? * International trade

This volume contains papers on Economic Theory and International Trade: The papers on Economic Theory cover the existence and structure of competitive equilibrium in various settings: non-convexities, non-transitivity of preferences, and absence of differentiability or free-disposal assumptions, the role of the compensating variation as a welfare measure, oligopoly under bounded rationality, and regulation of a public utility. The papers on International Trade offer analyses of the "Dutch disease" or the Atlantic Slave Trade, or treat the influence of economic growth on import demand, the terms of trade, and other economic variables, as well as theoretical and empirical evidence for the validity of the Heckscher-Ohlin model. The papers, rigorous and often requiring mathematical sophistication, variously reflect Trout Rader's work.

This dissertation brings together three empirical studies of international trade issues covering trade policy reforms, trade patterns and the duration of trade relationships in Latin American countries. In the first essay, we review export activities in Brazil since the 1990s, describing changes in export basket composition and diversification of destination markets. Using highly disaggregated trade data, we decompose export growth into the extensive margin (exports of new goods) and the intensive margin (more exports of established goods). We then estimate a probabilistic model of export decisions to investigate whether previous export experience in proximate markets contributes to the shipment of new goods to a trade partner. We find that prior export experience in neighboring countries has a small, positive effect on the probability of exporting in the future. As far as export promotion is concerned, this suggests that new trade relationships should be formed with countries within regions where previous export experience exists. After describing, in the first essay, what products and to what countries Brazil exports, in the second essay we study how long trade relationships last. We characterize the duration of trade relationships by investigating the length of time until Brazil stops exporting a good to a country and whether exports of particular products or to particular markets last longer than others. Our results indicate that trade relationships have a very short life, with a median duration of only 2 years. We add to the list of trade policy recommendations on export promotion by suggesting that instead of encouraging new relationships it might be better to prevent the existing ones from ending too soon. In the last essay, we study trade issues in another Latin American country. We perform a quantitative analysis of the impact of various trade policies on international trade patterns, domestic prices and poverty in Bolivia. With a unique dataset combining trade data with survey data at the household level, we simulate the magnitude of a variety of trade shocks using a partial-equilibrium model, feed these shocks into price and quantity changes, and finally feed these price and quantity changes into household incomes and expenditures.

Consisting of 8 essays written between 1938 and 1992, this volume brings together in one place the significant contributions which Arthur 1. Bloomfield - a leading specialist in the field of international economics and especially international finance - has made to the history of international trade theory.