Marcelo Olarreaga

Estimating Trade Restrictiveness Indices

The objective of this paper is to provide indicators of trade restrictiveness that include both measures of tariff and nontariff barriers for 91 developing and industrial countries. For each country, the authors estimate three trade restrictiveness indices. The first one summarizes the degree of trade distortions that each country imposes on itself through its own trade policies. The second one focuses on the trade distortions imposed by each country on its import bundle. The last index focuses on market access and summarizes the trade distortions imposed by the rest of the world on each countrys export bundle. All indices are estimated for the broad aggregates of manufacturing and agriculture products. Results suggest that poor countries (and those with the highest poverty headcount) tend to be more restrictive, but they also face the highest trade barriers on their export bundle. This is partly explained by the fact that agriculture protection is generally larger than manufacturing protection. Nontariff barriers contribute more than 70 percent on average to world protection, underlying their importance for any study on trade protection.

Import Demand Elasticities and Trade Distortions

To study the effects of tariffs on gross domestic product (GDP), one needs import demand elasticities at the tariff line level that are consistent with GDP maximization. These do not exist. The authors modify Kohlis (1991) GDP function approach to estimate demand elasticities for 4,625 imported goods in 117 countries. Following Anderson and Neary (1992, 1994) and Feenstra (1995), they use these estimates to construct theoretically sound trade restrictiveness indices, and GDP losses associated with existing tariff structures. Countries are revealed to be 30 percent more restrictive than their simple or import-weighted average tariffs would suggest. Thus, distortion is nontrivial. GDP losses are largest in China, Germany, India, Mexico, and the United States.

Trade and Production, 1976-99

The authors have prepared this paper as a companion to the Trade and Production database, which contains trade, production, and tariff data for 67 industrial and developing countries at the industry level for 1976-99. The sector disaggregation in the database follows the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC), with data provided at the three-digit level (28 industries) for all 67 countries and at the four-digit level (81 industries) for 24 of these countries. The production data are from the United Nations Industrial Development Organizations Industrial Statistics Database at the three- and four-digit level of ISIC. They include value added, total output, average wages, capital formation, number of employees, number of female employees, and number of firms. The trade data are from the United Nations Statistics Divisions Commodity Trade (Comtrade) database (through the World Banks World Integrated Trade Solution, or WITS, software) and include imports and exports. Data on mirror exports (reported by trading partners) were obtained using WITS. The trade data are aggregated by region and income group, as defined by the World Bank. A separate data set provides bilateral trade flows (by partner) at the industry level. The data on average tariffs (most favored nation) are from the Trains database maintained by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and from the World Trade Organizations Trade Policy Reviews and Integrated Database. The database also provides an input-output table for each country using data from version 4 of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) database. The database is available on request on CD-ROM in a series of ASCII files and Microsoft Excel worksheets. It is also available on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org./research/trade.

Export Promotion Agencies: What Works and What Doesn't

The number of national export promotion agencies (EPAs) has tripled over the past two decades. While more countries have made them part of their national export strategy, studies have criticized their efficiency in developing countries (Hogan, Keesing, and Singer 1991). Partly in reaction to these critiques, EPAs have been retooled (see International Trade Centre, ITC, 1998 or 2000, for example). This paper studies the impact of existing EPAs and their strategies based on a new data set covering 104 industrial and developing countries. Results suggest that on average they have a strong and statistically significant impact on exports. For each

Reducing Agricultural Tariffs Versus Domestic Support: What's More Important for Developing Countries?

1 of export promotion, the paper estimates a

Trade-related technology diffusion and the dynamics of North-South and South-South integration

40 increase in exports for the median EPA. However, there is heterogeneity across regions, levels of development, and types of instruments. Furthermore, there are strong diminishing returns, suggesting that as far as EPAs are concerned, small is beautiful.

Who determines Mexican trade policy

High levels of protection and domestic support for farmers in industrial countries significantly affect many developing countries, both directly and through the price-depressing effect of agricultural support policies. High tariffs--in both rich and poor countries--and domestic support may also lower the world price of agricultural products, benefiting net importers. The authors assess the impact of reducing tariffs and domestic support in a sample of 119 countries. Least developed countries (LDCs) are disproportionately affected by agricultural support policies. More than 18 percent of LDC exports are subject to domestic support in at least one World Trade Organization (WTO) member, as compared to only 9 percent of their imports. For other developing countries the figures are around 4 percent for both their exports and imports. So, the prevailing pattern of trade suggests the world price-reducing effect of agricultural domestic support policies may induce a welfare loss in LDCs. The authors develop a simple partial equilibrium model of global trade in commodities that benefit from domestic support in at least one WTO member. The simulation results suggest there will be large differences between LDCs and other developing economies in terms of the impact of a 50 percent cut in tariffs as compared to a 50 percent cut in domestic support. Developing countries as a group would suffer a welfare loss from a cut in support, while LDCs would experience a small gain. For both groups of countries, tariff reductions by WTO members--including own liberalization--will have a positive effect on welfare. The results show both the importance of focusing on tariffs as well as subsities, and the need for complementary actions to allow a domestic supply response to occur in developing countries if world prices rise

Markups, Entry Regulation, and Trade: Does Country Size Matter?

This paper examines the impact on total factor productivity of North-South and South-South trade-related research and development (R&D) spillovers. It is the first to do so at the industry level for developing countries. North-South and South-South R&D flows are constructed based on industry-specific R&D in the North, North-South and South-South trade patterns, and input-output relations in the South. The main findings are: 1) North-South and South-South R&D flows have a positive impact on total factor productivity, though the former is larger. 2) R&D-intensive industries benefit mainly from North-South R&D flows while low R&D-intensive industries benefit mainly from South-South R&D flows. These results have implications for dynamic comparative advantage and for the dynamics of North-South and South-South regional integration.

There Goes Gravity: How eBay Reduces Trade Costs

Using a political economy approach, the authors analyze the pattern of protection in Mexicos manufacturing sector during the period of trade policy reforms (1985-89), when Mexico experienced significant trade liberalization and an important inflow of foreign direct investment. They take into account the potential effect of foreign direct investment on endogenous tariff formation. It turns out that the data support this analytic approach, in which the formulation of trade policy reflects political support, and in which the presence of foreign direct investment in the sector strongly affects the pattern of tariff protection before and after reform. In Mexican manufacturing, especially, sectors with heavy foreign direct investment received greater protection in import-competing sectors, although the move toward greater openness was associated with a reduction in the influence of industrial and foreign-investor lobbying.

The protectionist bias of duty drawbacks: evidence from Mercosur

Actual, and potential competition is a powerful source of discipline on the pricing behavior of firms with market power. The authors develop a simple model that shows that the effects of new entry, and import competition on industry price-cost markups, depend on country size. The authors predicted that barriers to domestic entry would have a stronger anti-competitive effect in large countries, while barriers to foreign entry (imports) would have a stronger effect in small countries. After estimating markups for manufacturing sectors in forty-one industrial, and developing countries, they test these hypotheses, and find that the hypotheses cannot be rejected by the data. For example, although Indonesia, and Italy impose the same number of regulations on the entry of new firms, the effect of the regulations on manufacturing markups is twenty percent greater in Italy because of its larger size. Similarly, while Chile and Zimbabwe have the same import penetration ration, the market discipline effect of imports is thirteen percent greater in Zimbabwe because of its smaller size.