Rodolfo Helg

How much (a)symmetry in Europe? Evidence from industrial sectors

Abstract To what extent do European countries differ with respect to the sources of cyclical fluctuations of industrial output? We look at output data disaggregated by industry for 11 European countries, and on the basis of a cointegrated vector autoregression model we examine the correlation of output innovations at the industry and country levels. We also discuss to what extent output innovations can be considered ‘symmetric’ or ‘asymmetric’. Our results point to the fact that, on average, more variance of output innovations is explained at the country, rather than the industry level. We also find that the importance of asymmetric disturbances is quite varied among the 11 countries, and we identify a ‘core’ of countries with a higher degree of symmetry.

On the Dynamics of Trade Patterns

In this paper we analyse the dynamics of trade patterns in the six largest industrialised countries and in eight fast growing Asian economies. For each of these countries we study the shape of the sectoral distribution of an index of trade specialisation and its evolution over time. Our analysis shows a marked difference between the advanced and the emerging countries as far as the degree of persistence is concerned: the former have in fact a highly persistent trade pattern, whereas the latter show a rapidly changing trade specialisation. However, the two groups of countries are more similar as far as the evolution of the degree of specialisation is concerned. Although emerging countries are still more specialised than the industrialised countries, both groups show a tendency toward a reduced polarisation and a more symmetric distribution of the specialisation index. This evidence is in line with the traditional trade theory, in which changing comparative advantage is the determinant of a changing trade pattern. Contrarily, this evidence does not support the idea that self-reinforcing mechanisms are prominent in international trade specialisation.

Patterns of International Fragmentation of Production and Implications for the Labor Markets

Growing shares of international trade flows consist of intermediate and unfinished goods shipped from one country to another to combine manufacturing or services activities at home with those performed abroad. This configuration of the productive structure has been named “internationally fragmented”. The purpose of our work is to analyze the labor market effects of international fragmentation of production in Europe, looking at how it affects relative labor demand. Models of trade due to fragmentation of production suggest that when international fragmentation takes place we can expect to observe a change in the relative factor intensities of the affected industries. We use international trade data specifically related to international fragmentation of production to test if the shift in intensity of skilled and unskilled labor employed in Italy and Germany during the 1990s it related to the fragmentation activity.

A note on the stationarity of the primary commodities relative price index

Abstract The Prebisch-Singer hypothesis of a secular decline in the relative price of primary commodities is investigated searching for the presence of a deterministic rather than stochastic trend and controlling for major structural breaks. The evidence is in favour of a deterministic trend with a negative slope for the largest part of the century and a major structural break at the end of World War One.