The increasing intra-industry trade (IIT) gives an impetus to theoretical foundations of new trade theories. For the empirical assessment, the measurement and segregation of IIT become very ...essential. On the basis of quality of product, IIT is segregated into two parts. First is based on qualitative differentiation of the products known as vertical IIT (VIIT) and the second is based on the differentiation of the products called as horizontal IIT (HIIT). The work of Greenaway, Hine, and Milner (1994, Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, 130(1), 77–100), Fontagné and Freudenberg (1997, Intra-industry trade: Methodological issues reconsidered, Paris: Centre d’Études Prospectives et d’Informations Internationales) and Azhar and Elliott (2006, Review of World Economics, 142(3), 476–495) are some of the milestones in the methodological development of IIT. However, these methods are not free from certain shortcomings. Thus, the article attempts to extend the measurement technique with product quality index (PQI) to overcome the existing shortcomings such as arbitrariness of dispersion limit and bias in the classification of IIT into HIIT and VIIT.
JEL Code: F140
This study examines the intra-industry trade relationship that China has with its 20 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation partners during the 2000–2014 period. By providing both a developing and ...developed country focus this research examines both the trends and determinants of these trade relationships from inter-industry trade, vertical inter-industry trade, horizontal inter-industry trade, and inter-industry perspectives. This study found that China’s highest levels of inter-industry trade are with Japan, Korea, and Taiwan and that these relationships have been trending upwards from both horizontal inter-industry trade and vertical inter-industry trade perspectives since 2000. While our empirical assessment using country- and industry-specific variables showed that tariff rates, market size, and factor endowments play an important role within the make-up of inter-industry trade. Finally, from a policy perspective, our study highlights the need for China to not only push forward with its Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership trade negotiations, but also branch out by gaining additional support from other Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation partners so as to further enhance its role in the region.
This paper develops a dynamic industry model with heterogeneous firms to analyze the intra-industry effects of international trade. The model shows how the exposure to trade will induce only the more ...productive firms to enter the export market (while some less productive firms continue to produce only for the domestic market) and will simultaneously force the least productive firms to exit. It then shows how further increases in the industry's exposure to trade lead to additional inter-firm reallocations towards more productive firms. The paper also shows how the aggregate industry productivity growth generated by the reallocations contributes to a welfare gain, thus highlighting a benefit from trade that has not been examined theoretically before. The paper adapts Hopenhayn's (1992a) dynamic industry model to monopolistic competition in a general equilibrium setting. In so doing, the paper provides an extension of Krugman's (1980) trade model that incorporates firm level productivity differences. Firms with different productivity levels coexist in an industry because each firm faces initial uncertainty concerning its productivity before making an irreversible investment to enter the industry. Entry into the export market is also costly, but the firm's decision to export occurs after it gains knowledge of its productivity.
A state’s decision to engage in cyber operations has important implications for its trade. Successful cyber espionage could yield valuable trade secrets that could boost domestic production and spur ...economic growth. On the other hand, uncovered cyber operations could invite devastating sanctions that retard economic development. In spite of this, the nexus between trade and cyber attacks has received little attention in the literature. In this article, I explore how a state’s trade relations affect its propensity to engage in cyber attacks. I develop a theoretical framework that links the composition of a state’s trade to its deficit in proprietary information relative to other states. I decompose trade into its inter- and intra-industry components and show that while inter-industry trade is associated with higher incidence of state-sponsored cyber attacks, intra-industry trade has the opposite effect. I also show that these effects are non-monotonic, varying by the share of inter- or intra-industry trade in total trade. The results also show that states that have a heavy concentration of high-tech industries such as aerospace, computers, and pharmaceuticals have a higher propensity to engage in cyber espionage operations. These results are robust to a variety of controls and specifications.
Most of the empirical studies in the literature on intra-industry trade are conducted at the country level. Countries, however, differ in terms of granularity and internal heterogeneity. In the ...present study we empirically identify the determinants of the overall IIT as well as its horizontal and vertical components in the trade of Spanish and Polish NUTS-2 regions with all existing trade partners over the period 2005-2014. In order to obtain unbiased results, we utilize a semi-mixed effect model, estimated with the PPML method. We estimate the models jointly for all Spanish and Polish regions and then disjointly in a comparative manner - in order to identify incongruities of reaction to the various factors investigated. These include both traditional factors and a number of unorthodox factors such as regional path dependence, quality of regional institutions, the core or peripheral status of the reporting region.
This article investigates the drivers of vertical intra‐industry trade (VIIT) in Hungarian agri‐food trade with the European Union (EU). It identifies three possible ways to measure intra‐industry ...trade (IIT) flows (GHM, FF, and N methods) and defines six hypotheses to test for the drivers of VIIT with three panel data models (static, dynamic, and FEVD). The results suggest that factor endowments are negatively, while economic size is positively and significantly related to VIIT. Distance and VIIT were found to be negatively related as is commonly the case in the standard gravity model. It was also found that VIIT is greater if a New Member State (NMS) is exporting agri‐food produce to an NMS, while EU accession has ambiguously influenced the share of VIIT. In general, it seems that our results are independent from model estimations and interestingly they do not differ considerably as we a priori expected. Moreover, our results seem surprisingly robust across various measurements of ITT.
Why are industries highly active in some battles over international trade policies, but in other instances, individual firms are highly active and industry groups are subdued? I argue that rising ...intra-industry trade in the postwar period has undermined traditional trade coalitions and created new opportunities for individual firms to become politically active. Drawing on new trade theories from economics, as well as work on firm heterogeneity and lobbying, I argue that industry associations become less active as intra-industry trade increases due to competing trade preferences among member firms. At the same time, individual firms become more politically active. My results suggest that firms lobby not only for protection, but liberalization. Using data on lobbying expenditures in the USA, my work takes recent analyses of intra-industry trade and lobbying a step further. I show how intra-industry trade redraws domestic political alignments and changes the composition of societal coalitions organized to influence trade policy.
To examine how changes in relative national prices affect trade flows, this study estimates the impact of changes in industry-specific effective real exchange rates on industry-level trade balances, ...exports, and imports. We analyze the variations in industry-specific intra-industry trade and vertical specialization, which may both govern the long-run relationship between real exchange rates and trade flows. We employ sample information from 13 manufacturing industries across five Asian countries from 2001 to 2015. Rather than country-level aggregate measures, we use disaggregated industry-specific real exchange rates, which provide better measures of relative national prices and may help to uncover different responses that are masked by aggregate data. Fixed-effect estimations reveal that greater price competitiveness, as measured by depreciation in industry-specific effective real exchange rates, increases industry-level trade balances. We find that the elasticity of industry-level trade balances with respect to industry-specific real exchange rates declines as vertical specialization increases. There is also some limited evidence that this elasticity increases as intra-industry trade increases. Taken together, our findings suggest that global supply chains are more important than intra-industry trade in examining the response of trade balances to real exchange rate changes. Importantly, these heterogeneous impacts imply that policies regarding exchange rate management may be of limited potency and will affect different industries in different ways.
We analyze welfare effects of trade in renewable resources, which is induced by consumer love of variety in resource consumption. We model two countries, one being relatively wealthy in labor and ...capital, the other one being relatively resource abundant. For open-access resources, we show that trade freeness benefits the country that is wealthy in labor and capital, as it improves access to a larger variety of resources, especially to those of the resource-abundant country. The resource-abundant country also benefits from improved access to variety, but due to the increased resource demand and resulting overuse, this country’s welfare may depend on trade freeness in a non-monotonic fashion. We derive conditions such that welfare first decreases and then increases when trade freeness varies from autarky to costless trade. In direct comparison, autarky may generate higher welfare than costless trade only under restrictive conditions, in particular if endowments are very asymmetric and if the love of variety effect is weak. We also consider resource harvesting under private property rights and show that only for a sufficiently low discount rate the welfare increase from trade freeness in the resource-abundant country is sustainable.