Search results for "Trade barrier"
showing 10 items of 30 documents
Is Inequality Harmful for North-South Intra-Industry Trade Growth?
2007
Do foreign workers reduce trade barriers? Microeconomic evidence
2015
This paper provides evidence that foreign workers reduce firms' trade costs and thus increase the probability that firms export. This informs both the literature on trade costs and the microeconomic literature on firms' export behaviour. We identify the nationality of each worker in a large sample of German establishments, and relate this to the exporting behaviour of these establishments. We allow for the possible endogeneity of an establishment's workforce by instrumenting the share of foreign workers with the regional distribution of foreign workers in the wider labour market. We find a significant effect of worker nationality on exporting which is not driven by the industrial, occupatio…
DO TRANSPORT COSTS HAVE A DIFFERENTIAL EFFECT ON TRADE AT THE SECTORAL LEVEL?
2008
This article aims to analyse the determinants of transport costs and to investigate their influence in international trade with a sample of disaggregate trade data. First, we estimate a transport-cost function using cross-section data on maritime and overland transport for four sectors: agro-industry, ceramic tiles, motor vehicle parts and accessories, and electrical and mechanical household appliances, obtained from interviews held with Spanish exporters and logistics operators in 2001. Second, we study the relationship between transport costs and trade and estimate the elasticity of trade with respect to transport costs for each sector. Important differences for high value- and low value-…
Panama and the WTO: new constitutionalism of trade policy and global tax governance
2017
"Corrigendum" in Review of International Political Economy, 24(4), p. 738 (DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2017.1332547). Tax havens and tax flight have lately received increasing attention, while interest toward multilateral trade policies has somewhat diminished. We argue that more attention needs to be paid exactly to the interrelations between trade and tax policies. Drawing from two case studies on Panama's trade disputes, we show how World Trade Organization (WTO) rules can be used both to resist attempts to sanction secrecy structures and to promote measures against tax flight. The theory of new constitutionalism can help to explain how trade treaties can 'lock in' tax policies. However, our c…
Competitiveness and interregional as well as international trade: The case of Catalonia
2010
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…
Impact on European Union Studies of the Developing EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreements with Third Countries: The Case of Canada
2015
The EU has signed an agreement in principle for a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Canada, the first of its kind for the EU, entering into force in 2015, opening a renewed market access strategy for the EU and has initiated negotiations with the USA.
How Bad is Globalization for Labour Standards in the North?
2010
We analyse a world consisting of "the North" and "the South" where labour standards in the North are set by trade unions. Standards set by unions tend to increase output and welfare. There are no unions in the South and work standards are suboptimal. Trade between these two countries can imply a reduction in work standards in the North. Moreover, when trade unions are established in the South, the North, including northern unions, tend to lose. Quantitatively, these effects are small and overcompensated by gains in the South. The existing empirical literature tends to support our findings.
Investment and growth in Europe during the Golden Age
2009
During the ‘Golden Age’, the high investment rates reached by the European countries have been considered crucial in explaining growth. The literature about the Golden Age has emphasized supply-side explanations based on structural change, the reconstruction effort and the catch-up hypothesis, but also demand-side explanations focused on the effects of demand stability for promoting high rates of investment. In this article we have focused our attention on the evolution of the user cost of capital for explaining the high rates of investment. Our hypothesis is that the increase in investment rates was propelled by the decline in the user cost of capital, the consequence largely of the drop i…
A global perspective on effectiveness of aid for trade
2013
Recent global initiatives on debt relief and development assistance call for increasing aid for trade to the poorest countries. The paper applies a multi-country computable general equilibrium model to measure the effectiveness of alternative aid for trade categories. The findings show that aid for trade policies expand trade and alleviate international income inequalities in the recipient countries, that will benefit mainly from aid for trade adjustment and technical assistance.
Trade in final goods and the impact of innovation
2011
Abstract This paper analyses how innovations in imported final goods impact via terms of trade effects upon welfare growth in the domestic economy. It is shown that the impacts, although differing across countries, are quantitatively significant and worthy of further consideration.