0000000000243151
AUTHOR
Carlos Llano
Competitiveness and interregional as well as international trade: The case of Catalonia
Recent years have seen a surge of interest among industrial organization economists in using data on international trade flows as windows into competitiveness. For countries that are at least mid sized (e g., Spain), interregional trade tends to be as large as or significantly larger than international trade. The case of Catalonia, a Spanish region, illustrates how ignoring interregional flows can lead to erroneous inferences about a region's external competitiveness. Accounting for Catalonia's interregional as well as international flows shifts what is generally assessed to be a chronic trade deficit in goods into a surplus and changes diagnoses of which Catalan sectors generate external s…
Cities export specialization
We analyse whether more populated cities have an export specialization different from the one of less populated cities. Using very detailed product-level export data for Brazilian urban areas over ...
Networks and the disappearance of the intranational home bias
Abstract Previous studies have shown that, not only countries, but also regions have a preference to trade within their administrative borders. Using unique trade flows data, we also find a large home bias in Spanish intranational trade. However, we show that this home bias tends to disappear once we take into account the higher density of social and business networks within regions than between regions. We also find that the home bias does not disappear if intranational trade flows are measured in quantity rather than value. This fact might explain why previous studies on other European countries still find an intranational home bias, even when network effects are taken into account.
Rethinking Regional Competitiveness: Catalonia's International and Interregional Trade 1995-2006
Studies of competitiveness tend to focus on a local economy's global interactions, particularly its international trade. But for countries that are at least mid-sized (such as Spain), interregional trade tends to be as large as or significantly larger than international trade. The case of Catalonia illustrates the importance of interregional flows in truly analyzing and devising strategies for a region's external competitiveness. Accounting for interregional trade changes and performing analyses of Catalonia's overall merchandise trade balance, which sectors generate external surpluses as opposed to deficits, and who Catalonia's key trading partners are, and the use of a gravity-model appro…