Miriam Manchin

Institutions, Infrastructure, and Trade

The authors examine the influence of infrastructure, institutional quality, colonial and geographic context, and trade preferences on the pattern of bilateral trade. They are interested in threshold effects, and so emphasize those cases where bilateral country pairs do not actually trade. The authors depart from the institutions and infrastructure literature in this respect, using selection-based gravity modeling of trade flows. They also depart from this literature by mixing principal components (to condense the institutional and infrastructure measures) with a focus on deviations in the resulting indexes from expected values for given income cohorts to control for multicollinearity. The authors work with a panel of 284,049 bilateral trade flows from 1988 to 2002. Matching bilateral trade and tariff data and controlling for tariff preferences, level of development, and standard distance measures, they find that infrastructure and institutional quality are significant determinants not only of export levels, but also of the likelihood exports will take place at all. Their results support the notion that export performance, and the propensity to take part in the trading system at all, depends on institutional quality and access to well-developed transport and communications infrastructure. Indeed, this dependence is far more important, empirically, than variations in tariffs in explaining sample variations in North-South trade.

Making EU Trade Agreements Work: The Role of Rules of Origin

Book description: Special and differential treatment (SDT) for developing countries has always been a central, but controversial, element of the GATT/WTO multilateral trading system. A large literature on the subject of SDT has emerged in the last 50 years by both proponents and opponents. The contributions to this volume focus on the rationale, institutional features and economic effectiveness of SDT. The editors have carefully selected a number of key articles with a special emphasis on evaluations of the impact of SDT, especially preferential market access. The book also includes more recent contributions which discuss whether there is a continued need for such special treatment and how it might be designed both from a development objective and from the perspective of the trading system generally. This volume is an essential source of reference for those who follow economic and legal debates on the future of the multilateral trade regime and the role of the developing countries in it. The editors have written an authoritative new introduction which illuminates their choice and highlights the contribution of each article.

Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions and the Role of Trade Costs

Cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have increased dramatically over the last two decades. This paper analyses the role of trade costs in explaining the increase in the number of cross-border mergers and acquisitions. In particular, we distinguish horizontal and non-horizontal M&As and investigate whether trade costs affect these two types of mergers differently. We analyse this question using industry data for 23 OECD countries for the period 1990-2001. Our findings suggest that while in the aggregate trade costs affect cross-border merger activity negatively its impact differs importantly across horizontal and non-horizontal mergers. The impact of trade costs is less negative for horizontal mergers, which is consistent with the tariff-jumping argument.

Preference Utilisation and Tariff Reduction in EU Imports from ACP Countries

Despite the long relationship between the EU and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP)countries aimed at encouraging their exports while stimulating growth and investment, the ACPstates still face difficulties in integrating into the world economy. This paper examines the non-leastdeveloped ACP countries preferential trade with the EU. The objective is to explain thedeterminants of preferential exports of ACP countries towards the EU and to assess the impact ofpreferences on trade volumes. We also investigate the existence of a threshold in the offered dutyreduction under which traders have no incentives to ask for preferences.

Rules of origin and the web of East Asian free trade agreements

The authors provide an overview of the preferential rules of origin in East Asia, highlighting the aspects that might possibly generate some trade-chilling effects. They review characteristics of existing preferential trade agreements with special emphasis on lessons from the European experience, and analyze some important features of the existing rules of origin in East and South-East Asian regional integration agreements. The empirical analysis of the effectiveness of preferentialism on intra-regional trade flows focuses on the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), with the aim of providing a rough estimate of the costs of requesting preferences. The results suggest that preferential tariffs favorably affect intra-regional imports only at very high margins (around 25 percentage points). This points to the likelihood of high administrative costs attached to the exploitation of preferences, particularly with regard to the compliance with AFTAs rules of origin.

Clothes without an emperor: analysis of the preferential tariffs in ASEAN

This paper examines the current state of intra-ASEAN trade under the preferential regime of the AFTA. It partly addresses some data problems and employs a gravity model to arrive at alternative ways of gauging the importance of preferences in the absence of data on the actual utilisation of AFTA preferential tariffs. Our results confirm the wide-spread notion that the AFTA preferential scheme is of very little consequence to intra-regional trade. However, in that limited range of products where AFTA might have an influence, preferences seem to matter only when the differential margin between the MFN and preferential tariff rates reaches a critical amount, allowing regional exporters to cover the costs of requesting preferences.

Regional Integration in Asia: The Role of Infrastructure

The rapid growth of intra-Asian trade, especially in the last couple of decades, represents both a marked shift in export orientation and an increasing integration of regional markets. In 2005, half of total Asian exports were destined for regional consumption, and a further rise can only be expected given the high growth rates of intraregional trade, peaking at 25% in 2004 (World Trade Organization [WTO] 2006). Against such a backdrop, the surge of regionalism in Asia today comes as no surprise. Nowhere in the world is the proliferation of regional integration arrangements (RIAs) more evident than in Asia today. As of September 2006, the individual East and South Asian countries considered in this study were involved in 301 free trade negotiations or signed agreements. While political and security motives are also influential, the economic imperative to further feed the market’s appetite for more regional trade is clearly driving policy agents along the track toward free trade agreements (FTAs).

Protection and Performance

We examine the linkages between import policy and export performance, extending classic macroeconomic trade effects to more recent concepts from the modern literature on gravity models. We also examine these effects empirically with a panel of global and bilateral trade spanning 15 years. Our emphasis on the role of import policy (i.e. tariffs) of exporters as an explanation of trade volumes contrasts with the recent emphasis on importer policy in the gravity literature. It also reinforces the growing body of evidence on the importance of economic environmental (policy and infrastructure) conditions in explaining relative export performance and is in line with the literature on global value chains.

Market Structure in Multisector General Equilibrium Models of Open Economies

We provide an overview of several approaches to modeling market structure in multisector general equilibrium (MSGE) models, including both oligopoly and monopolistic competition. We emphasize open economy models and applications to international economic policy. We map out practical strategies for implementing variations on market structure, including functional forms and calibration strategies. We also identify areas that, in our view, are promising for further research. This includes both exploring the implications of moving away from average cost pricing models (including monopolistic competition) for labor market outcomes and inequality, and better methods for econometric estimation of parameters and confronting alternative forms of market structure against measures of model performance (specification testing).

Market power in distribution and pass-through for consumers and producers

We examine the differential pass‐through of import prices into consumer and producer prices. We develop a framework with distribution costs and distribution market power. We then examine pass‐through from import prices to consumer and producer prices in the euro area using the U.S. import price as instrument. We find that pass‐through rates to producer prices are more sensitive to changes in distribution margins than pass‐through to consumer prices. Furthermore, only a portion of import price changes translate into domestic price changes limiting potential consumer benefits from tariff liberalization, with market power in distribution services being one important factor reducing pass‐through.