Search results for "international trade"

Norwegian-Polish Bilateral Trade Developments since 1990

2016

Are the determinants of CO2 emissions converging among OECD countries?

2013

This paper studies convergence in CO2emission intensity (CO2 emissions over GDP) among OECD countries over the period 1960-2008 based on its determinants, namely, energy intensity (energy consumption over GDP) and the so-called carbonisation index (CO2 emissions over energy consumption). We apply the Phillips and Sul (2007) methodology, which tests for the existence of convergence clubs. Our results highlight that differences in emission intensity convergence are more determined by differences in convergence of the carbonisation index rather than by differences in the dynamic convergence of energy intensity.

The Effect of Specialisation on Banks' Efficiency: An International Comparison

2006

Abstract This study analyses the effects of specialisation on the cost efficiency of a set of banking systems of the European Union over the period 1992–1998. Unlike in the established literature in which specialisation differences are not considered, in this paper cost inefficiencies are decomposed into two different components: the first is related to the inefficiency associated with the composition of specialisations in each banking system and the second is related to specific inefficiencies of banks within their specialisation. The results show the existence of high cost inefficiencies. However, the intra‐specialisation inefficiencies indicate that the inefficiencies of the European ban…

Deregulation, liberalization and consolidation of the Mexican banking system: Effects on competition

2011

Este articulo analiza la evolucion de la competencia en el sistema bancario Mexicano en el periodo 1993-2005, periodo de desregulacion, liberalizacion y consolidacion del sector. Para ello se utilizan dos medidas de competencia derivadas de la teoria de la Organizacion Industrial: el indice de Lerner y el estadistico H de Panzar y Rosse. La evidencia empirica no permite rechazar la existencia de competencia monopolistica. El indice de Lerner muestra una disminucion en la rivalidad competitiva en el mercado de los depositos y un incremento en el mercado de los prestamos, observandose una estrategia de subsidiacion cruzada entre ambos mercados. Los resultados obtenidos cuestionan la efectivid…

Depression of the deprived or eroding enthusiasm of the elites: What has shifted the support for international trade?

2020

Abstract We use the 2003 and 2013 waves of the International Survey Program (ISSP) in order to explore the change in people’s attitudes that may be behind the recent backlash against globalization. We show that the average support for international trade has decreased in many – albeit not all – countries, and we demonstrate that these changes are related to the depth and length of the global financial crisis of 2008/09 as well as the evolution of income inequality. Moreover, our results document a declining support of those individuals who are likely to benefit from international trade: the young, high-skilled and well-off. We show that this “eroding enthusiasm of the elites” is empirically…

Did the European exchange-rate mechanism contribute to the integration of peripheral countries?

2007

Abstract This paper analyses the effect on trade of the exchange-rate mechanism I by member country. We find that it has contributed to a deeper integration of those peripheral countries that participated in the mechanism for at least several years, providing a lesson for the ten new European Union members.

Who Uses Intermediaries in International Trade? Evidence from Firm-level Survey Data

2013

The present paper uses data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey conducted in Turkey in 2005 to shed light on the firms that use intermediaries in international trade. It lends robust empirical support to recent theories which suggest that indirect exporters are mostly small firms that are not profitable enough to cover the high fixed costs of building an own distribution network abroad. Manufacturers who develop new products are more likely to use trade intermediaries, as are firms that produce low-quality goods. In contrast, neither foreign ownership nor credit constraints are correlated with the choice of export mode. Moreover, firms that rely on trade intermediaries to sell their goods…

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…

Arms exports and restructuring in the Russian defence industry

2004

The defence industry has been one of the industries most seriously affected by the Russian economic crisis since 1992. The main restructuring policy applied in the industry during the first years of transition was conversion, that is, trying to re-use military resources for productive civil ends. By the mid-1990s, however, such a policy was already considered a failure, and since 1997 the Ministry of Economy has taken over the running of the defence industry and changed the direction of reform. In the summer of 1999 the responsibility for the running of the defence industry was transferred to five independent agencies, and this remains the situation. From 1997 the aim was still to restructu…

International competition in the first wave of globalization: new evidence on the margins of trade

2015

We pose a seemingly ageless question in economic history. To what extent did new entrants in the late nineteenth‐century cotton‐textile industry threaten the customary markets of the European core? Exploiting a newly constructed dataset on textile imports to Spain, we find that as trade costs fell, new rivals began to sell a greater variety of products. Along this dimension, competition can be said to have increased. In response, producers in Europe adjusted the type and number of goods exported. By 1914, specialization mapped onto endowments of skilled labour, capital, and access to raw materials. While firms in new industrializing countries exported low‐end varieties, incumbents in the co…