Search

Begin New Search Topic International Trade and Finance Political Geography Global Focus Content Type Working Paper Publication Year within 3 Years

11. Impact of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP): A Global Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Simulation

Author:
Ken Itakura
Publication Date:
10-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA)
Abstract:
This study estimates the potential economic effects of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) by using a recursively dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, which incorporates the global supply chains (GSCs) structure, also referred as the global value chains (GVCs). The tariff reduction schedules for the RCEP agreement are incorporated in addition to other large FTAs, such as the CPTPP. Second, the structure of GSCs is included in the CGE model to take into account the importance of trade in intermediate goods and services. This study implements the RCEP simulation scenarios for tariff reductions, services trade liberalization, logistic improvements, and investment commitments. Results show that the real GDP of RCEP members increases by $675 billion in total, of which ASEAN grows by $160 billion
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, Tariffs, and Supply Chains
Political Geography:
Global Focus

12. Measuring illicit financial flows: A gravity model approach to estimate international trade misinvoicing

Author:
Lourenço S. Paz
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
Illicit financial flows have recently attracted the attention of academia, practitioners, and multilateral organizations who consider them harmful to economic development. Some observers suggest that many of these flows occur via the misinvoicing of international trade transactions. This study develops a novel methodology based on the gravity model of international trade to estimate illicit financial flows using publicly available product-level international trade data. It contributes to the literature by estimating product-level transportation and insurance costs and providing, for the first time, an estimation for all countries of an upper bound of the values of export and of import over- and under-misinvoicing separately, without resorting to assumptions about trade statistics reliability. Application of the methodology is illustrated using six-digit product-level UN Comtrade data for 2013–16. The results indicate that misinvoicing is not confined to a few products or countries but is a widespread phenomenon that deserves future research.
Topic:
International Trade and Finance, Transportation, Illicit Financial Flows, and Misinvoicing
Political Geography:
Global Focus

13. The Role of Storage in Commodity Markets: Indirect Inference Based on Grains Data

Author:
Christophe Gouel and Nicolas Legrand
Publication Date:
07-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales (CEPII)
Abstract:
Understanding commodity prices dynamics is of crucial importance for assessing the persistence of cost-push costs or for countries dependent on commodity exports. Unfortunately, despite decades of research, the workhorse theoretical model in the field, the rational expectations storage model, is yet to be empirically validated. This paper provides the first full empirical test of the storage model. We first build a new storage model featuring a supply response, long-run demand and cost trends, and four structural shocks. We then develop a flexible empirical approach which relies on the indirect inference method and exploits the joint dynamics of prices and quantities unlike previous estimations which only use price information. The information contained in quantities is essential to relax restrictive identifying assumptions and empirically assess the overall consistency of the model's new features. Finally, we carry out a structural estimation on the aggregate index of the world most important staple food products: maize, rice, soybeans, and wheat. The results show that our extended storage model is consistent with most of the moments in the data, including the high price autocorrelation of which up to 42% can be explained by the transfer of inventories over time. They also show that, although for these commodities supply shocks are the main drivers of market dynamics, over the past 60 years all price spikes have been associated with large positive demand shocks.
Topic:
Agriculture, International Trade and Finance, Commodities, and Price
Political Geography:
Global Focus

14. The Culture-Promotion Effect of Multinationals on Trade: the IKEA case

Author:
Dylan Bourny, Daniel Mirza, and Jamel Saadaoui
Publication Date:
07-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales (CEPII)
Abstract:
In this paper, we investigate how some MNEs which spread their home culture over time and space to the rest of the world are affecting, in turn, trade flows from home. By selling products embodying cultural information related to their country of origin, those MNEs embrace the role of ambassadors of their home country. We argue that IKEA offers an ideal case to identify a multinational's culture-promotion effect on trade. We build a dataset on IKEA's presence in foreign markets between 1995 and 2015 and merge it with disaggregated product level trade between pairs of countries. We find solid evidence of an externality linked to IKEA: a setting of an IKEA new store in a destination increases trade flows by around 2% from Sweden for products that resemble to what the multinational offers (despite being completely unrelated to that multinational). This result is driven primarily by the products identified to encompass a high-cultural content. Other robustness checks and tests seem to be very much consistent with the hypothesis of IKEA promoting the Swedish culture to the world.
Topic:
Globalization, International Trade and Finance, Culture, and Multinational Corporations
Political Geography:
Global Focus

15. The Nature of Money and the Theory of International Trade: Thornton and Ricardo

Author:
Isabella Weber
Publication Date:
10-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts Amherst
Abstract:
A rich recent literature reinvestigates the nature of money, but little attention has been paid to the ramifications of the ways in which we theorize money for the theory of international trade. This paper examines the logical relationship between the neutrality of money and self-balancing trade based on Henry Thornton and David Ricardo as two foundational contributions to credit and commodity money theories respectively. I show that both authors theorize trade as self-balancing whenever money is conceptualized as neutral. I distinguish two notions of the neutrality of money: ex ante and ex post neutrality. In Thornton’s Paper Credit money is not neutral ex ante: there can be temporary trade imbalances. But in the long-run money is neutral ex post and international trade boils down to self-balancing barter. In Ricardo money is neutral both ex ante and ex post and international trade is always balanced unless central bank policy undermines monetary neutrality.
Topic:
International Trade and Finance, Economy, Money, and Trade
Political Geography:
Global Focus

16. Exploring ‘Non-Tariff Measures Black Box’: Whose Regulative NTMs on Which Products Improve the Imported Quality?

Author:
Mahdi Ghodsi
Publication Date:
02-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (WIIW)
Abstract:
Regulative non-tariff measures (NTMs), such as technical barriers to trade (TBTs) and sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures, have frequently been imposed to regulate the quality of imported goods when the market fails to address some issues of concern regarding harmful products with low standards. The impact of NTMs on trade values and trade volumes has been extensively modelled and analysed in the literature, while their quality impact has usually been studied using the unit values of imports. In this paper a monopolistic competition framework is presented, in which firms choose both the quality and the price of their exports subject to the compliance costs of NTMs behind the border and a fixed cost of technological change. Using the solutions of this model including NTMs, the quality of products at the six-digit level of the harmonised system (HS) traded globally and bilaterally during the period 1996–2017 is estimated. Using these estimates, the impacts of TBTs and SPS measures on trade values, volume, unit value and quality are estimated. On average and across all global bilateral trade, TBTs restrict imports while improving quality significantly. SPS measures stimulate trade and improve the average imported quality. Then, by estimating the importer-specific impact of NTMs on traded value, quantity, unit value, quality, and quality-adjusted price for each product, the ‘NTM Black Box’ is opened and analysed. This provides evidence of whether the quality of traded goods to an importing country has been upgraded despite the trade restrictiveness of NTMs.
Topic:
Economics, International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, and Non-Tariff Measures
Political Geography:
Global Focus

17. Assessing national laws for the implementation of CITES

Author:
Pascal Blickle, Angela Min Yi Hou, and Laura Störi
Publication Date:
03-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Trade and Economic Integration, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
Abstract:
This TradeLab project analyses the domestic legislation of 14 developing countries in implementing the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The present memo summarises the main findings across the 14 Parties. This memo finds that most assessed Parties have implemented the CITES' core requirements, and recommendations provided in the resolutions of the Conference of the Parties (CoP). The project identifies a minority of three African countries for which the CITES Secretariat may wish to review their Category 1 status. These Parties fall short of all or several of the following elements: they failed to appropriately designate Management and Scientific Authorities by law, circumscribe the Authorities' tasks and responsibilities, or – by exclusively regulating native species – appear not to comprehensively cover species listed in the Convention's three Appendices.
Topic:
Environment, International Trade and Finance, Science and Technology, Trade, Ecology, and Biology
Political Geography:
Africa and Global Focus

18. Social clauses in trade agreements: implications and action points for the private sector in developing countries

Author:
Anna Liz Thomas, Jarrod Suda, and Gaia Grasselli
Publication Date:
02-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Trade and Economic Integration, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
Abstract:
Since the 1990s, more free trade agreements have come to include social clauses, which make reference to domestic and international labour standards. As this international legal web continues to grow, so too will the questions and concerns from employers and businesses. This Tradelab report, for the International Organisation of Employers, provides practical guidance for those employers and businesses. It does so by taking the diverse array of actors, the tensions within, and the opportunities set forth by free trade agreements and elaborating upon them using three case studies.
Topic:
International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, Treaties and Agreements, Labor Issues, Free Trade, Trade, International Business, and Labor Market
Political Geography:
Global Focus

19. How to rein in fossil fuel subsidies ? Towards a New WTO Regime

Author:
Simon Happersberger, Eleanor Mateo, and Selcukhan Ünekbas
Publication Date:
08-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Trade and Economic Integration, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
Abstract:
Fossil fuel subsidies have negative consequences on the climate change, public budgets and and the transition to an environmentally friendly economy. Nevertheless, governments do not keep up with their commitments to phase out fossil fuel subsidies but misallocate again COVID-19 recovery funds in fossil fuel subsidies. This article provides an analysis of the current obstacles for phasing out fossil fuel subsidies and the potential of the WTO to advance a reform on fossil fuel subsidies. It argues that the WTO can contribute to a fossil fuel subsidies reform by its technical expertise in regulating subsidies, by its broad membership and by its institutional setting. Under the current framework of the ASCM, WTO member can use existing mechanisms, such as the TPRM, to increase transparency in the short term and facilitate discussions on the scope of subsidies while mitigating impacts on vulnerable groups or sectors. This would provide the ground for governments to work towards a new and ambitious agreement to stop producer fossil fuels subsidies and phase out consumer fossil fuels subsidies in the mid-to-long-term. However, the phase out of consumer subsidies needs to be carefully designed and embedded, to avoid unintended consequences on energy access and vulnerable households.
Topic:
Climate Change, Environment, International Trade and Finance, Natural Resources, Trade, Fossil Fuels, COVID-19, WTO, and Ecology
Political Geography:
Global Focus

20. TRIPS-Past to TRIPS-Plus: Upholding the Balance between Exclusivity and Access

Author:
James Bacchus
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for International Governance Innovation
Abstract:
A deadly global pandemic and other unique circumstances have combined to present the World Trade Organization (WTO) with an opportunity to modernize its rules for the trade-related aspects of intellectual property (IP) rights. The best place to begin is with a full realization of the negotiated balance between exclusivity and access in the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). There is the need to turn the “TRIPS-past” of WTO IP rules agreed in 1995 into the “TRIPS-plus” of improved rules more fit to purpose for the twenty-first century. New rules are needed to help spark new innovations of all kinds and the rapid spread of those innovations worldwide, including rules relating to intangible assets and especially to digital expressions of IP. Continuing questions over the extent to which the TRIPS Agreement protects the exclusivity of IP rights in COVID-19 vaccines underscore how much uncertainty remains about where the line of this balance is in this multilateral trade agreement, and also how much doubt still exists about whether that line is in the right place.
Topic:
International Cooperation, International Trade and Finance, Intellectual Property/Copyright, Multilateralism, Pandemic, COVID-19, and WTO
Political Geography:
Global Focus