Andrea Ariu

Services Versus Goods Trade: Are they the Same?

In this paper we compare static and dynamic features of trade in goods and trade in services at the micro level. By using data from the same country, Belgium, and by making use of a common definition of transaction, we are able to enrich the existing qualitative comparisons with quantitative insights and to fill the existing gap in the literature. First, we analyze static features of trade such as participation rates, firms characteristics, heterogeneity, concentration and trade variation. Then, we explore dynamic aspects focusing on entry, exit, survival and growth strategy in foreign markets. From a static perspective, our results reveal that there are limited qualitative differences between trade in goods and trade in services and even the quantitative ones do not justify the need of different theoretical models. In the time dimension instead, some key peculiarities of services offer new insights for differentiating between the two.

The Balance of Brains: Corruption and High Skilled Migration

In a mobile labor market, a high emigration rate of high skilled workers is not necessarily a problem, if counterbalanced by a high immigration rate. However, some countries experience a net gain of high skilled while others a net loss. Corruption is part of the explanation, acting through two different channels: first, it pushes skilled natives to virtuous countries, where they can find a job based on meritocratic criteria; second, it discourages the entry of foreign talents, which would hardly have access to string-pulling recommendations. This might induce a prolonged loss in human capital and vanish investments in education.

Service Trade and Occupational Tasks: An Empirical Investigation

Using micro data for Belgium we investigate the relationship between occupational tasks changes and the rise of service trade. We focus the analysis on the extensive margin and look at the heterogeneous proliferation of firms involved in exports and imports of services across sectors characterized by different tasks changes patterns. Occupational tasks changes display an extremely consistent relationship with participation to service trade across firm groups pointing to strong churning effects. The change in analytical (interactive and routine cognitive) tasks intensity has a positive (negative) impact across the board meaning that, in industries characterized by larger changes, firms have experienced both higher (lower) likelihood of entry and exit. The negative relationship between the change in interactive tasks and service exports participation underlines the special role that proximity between demand and supply plays for services. Interestingly, we find exactly the opposite result (a positive relationship) between the extensive margin of goods exports and interactive tasks. Moreover, our analysis suggests that the change in IT use per se does not strike as being a key underlying force behind the increase in the extensive margin of service exports.