Regional Economic Outlook: Sub-Saharan Africa Prepared by the Policy Wing of the IMF African Department, this first, annual issue of Regional Economic Outlook: Sub-Saharan Africa analyzes economic, ...trade, and institutional issues in 2004, and prospects in 2005, for the 42 countries covered by the Department (for data reasons, Eritrea and Liberia are excluded). Topics examined include responses to exogenous shocks, growth performance and growth-enhancing policies, and the effectiveness of regional trade arrangements. Detailed aggregate and country data (as of February 24, 2005) are provided in an appendix and a statistical appendix, and a list of relevant publications by the African Department is included.
The estimated coefficient of distance on the volume of trade is generally found to increase rather than decrease through time using the traditional gravity model of trade. This distance puzzle proved ...robust to several ad hoc versions of the model using data for 1962-96 for a large sample of 130 countries. The introduction of an "augmented" barrier to trade function removes the paradox, yielding a decline in the estimate of the elasticity of trade to distance of about 11 percent over the 35-year period for the whole sample. However, the "death of distance" is shown to be largely confined to bilateral trade between rich countries, with poor countries becoming marginalized.
The introduction of the euro generated substantial interest in measuring the impact of currency unions (CUs) on trade flows. Rose's (2000) initial estimates suggested a tripling of trade and created ...a literature in search of "more reasonable" CU effects. A recent meta-analysis of this literature shows that subsequent papers quantify CU trade impacts at 30-90 percent. However, most recent studies use shorter time series and fewer countries than Rose in his original work. We revisit Rose's original benchmark, extend the dataset, and address Baldwin's (2006) critiques regarding the proper specification of gravity models in large panels by simultaneously accounting for multilateral resistance and unobserved bilateral heterogeneity. This produces a robust average CU trade effect of 45 percent. Yet, the trade impacts of individual CUs vary substantially and are generally lower than those of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Our revised benchmark can be used as a yardstick for future studies to delineate how estimates differ due to new data or differences in econometric specifications.
Services Trade and Policy Francois, Joseph; Hoekman, Bernard
Journal of economic literature,
09/2010, Letnik:
48, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
A substantial body of research has taken shape on trade in services since the mid-1980s. Much of this is inspired by the WTO and regional trade agreements. However, an increasing number of papers ...focus on the impacts of unilateral services sector liberalization. The literature touches on important linkages between trade and FDI in services and the general pattern of productivity growth and economic development. This paper surveys the literature on services trade, focusing on contributions that investigate the determinants of international trade and investment in services, the potential gains from greater trade, and efforts to cooperate to achieve such liberalization through trade agreements. There is increasing evidence that services liberalization is a major potential source of gains in economic performance, including productivity in manufacturing and the coordination of activities both between and within firms. The performance of service sectors, and thus services policies, may also be an important determinant of trade volumes, the distributional effects of trade, and overall patterns of economic growth and development. At the same time, services trade is also a source of increasing political unease about the impacts of globalization on labor markets, linked to worries about offshoring and the potential pressure this places on wages in high income countries.
Until the 1990s, the main users of safeguards and antidumping laws were Australia, Canada, the European Union, and the United States. Since then, many countries have implemented such laws, leading to ...a proliferation in antidumping and safeguard activity across the world. This timely book documents the political economy surrounding the implementation of these laws in seven Latin American countries and provides details on the institutions created, implementation of the laws, and subsequent activity. It finds that, in the larger political context, antidumping and safeguards are a necessary quid pro quo to certain important sectors to obtain much more liberalized trade policies for the general economy.
This paper exploits India's rapid, comprehensive, and externally imposed trade reform to establish a causal link between changes in tariffs and firm productivity. Pro-competitive forces, resulting ...from lower tariffs on final goods, as well as access to better inputs, due to lower input tariffs, both appear to have increased firm-level productivity, with input tariffs having a larger impact. The effect was strongest in import-competing industries and industries not subject to excessive domestic regulation. While we find no evidence of a differential impact according to state-level characteristics, we observe complementarities between trade liberalization and additional industrial policy reforms.
In a world in which global trade is at risk, where warehouses and airports, shipping lanes and seaports try to guard against the likes of Al Qaeda and Somali pirates, and natural disaster can disrupt ...the flow of goods, even our "stuff" has a political life. The high stakes of logistics are not surprising, Deborah Cowen reveals, if we understand its genesis in war.
InThe Deadly Life of Logistics, Cowen traces the art and science of logistics over the last sixty years, from the battlefield to the boardroom and back again. Focusing on choke points such as national borders, zones of piracy, blockades, and cities, she tracks contemporary efforts to keep goods circulating and brings to light the collective violence these efforts produce. She investigates how the old military art of logistics played a critical role in the making of the global economic order-not simply the globalization of production, but the invention of the supply chain and the reorganization of national economies into transnational systems. While reshaping the world of production and distribution, logistics is also actively reconfiguring global maps of security and citizenship, a phenomenon Cowen charts through the rise of supply chain security, with its challenge to long-standing notions of state sovereignty and border management.
Though the object of corporate and governmental logistical efforts is commodity supply,The Deadly Life of Logisticsdemonstrates that they are deeply political-and, considered in the context of the long history of logistics, deeply indebted to the practice of war.
The great rebalancing Pettis, Michael; Pettis, Michael
2014., 20141026, 2014, 2013-01-03, 2015-01-01, 20130101, c2013
eBook
China's economic growth is sputtering, the Euro is under threat, and the United States is combating serious trade disadvantages. Another Great Depression? Not quite. Noted economist and China expert ...Michael Pettis argues instead that we are undergoing a critical rebalancing of the world economies. Debunking popular misconceptions, Pettis shows that severe trade imbalances spurred on the recent financial crisis and were the result of unfortunate policies that distorted the savings and consumption patterns of certain nations. Pettis examines the reasons behind these destabilizing policies, and he predicts severe economic dislocations that will have long-lasting effects.
Demonstrating how economic policies can carry negative repercussions the world over,The Great Rebalancingsheds urgent light on our globally linked economic future.
The emergence of globalization was neither accidental nor inevitable. To make the "free flow" of commodities, capital, and money possible, governments first had to introduce a new political ...infrastructure. InRemaking U.S. Trade Policy, Nitsan Chorev focuses on trade liberalization in the United States from the 1930s to the present as she explores the political origins of today's global economy.
The ability of the U.S. government to impose its preferences on other governments is an important part of the story of globalization, but what is central to Chorev's analysis is understanding why the nation's leaders supported trade liberalization in the first place. For Chorev, the explanation lies in domestic political struggles. Advocates of free trade prevailed in the struggle with protectionists by working to change the institutions governing trade policy, replacing institutional arrangements that favored protectionism with new ones that favored a free-market approach.
The new institutional arrangements shifted authority from a protectionist Congress to liberal agencies at the executive branch and to the World Trade Organization. These transformations entailed a move from a politicized location, in which direct negotiations and debates dominate the process of decision-making, to bureaucratic and judicial arenas where a legal logic dominates and the citizens have little voice.
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