Sébastien Miroudot

Vertical Trade, Trade Costs and FDI

Firms find advantages in sourcing inputs from abroad and in fragmenting their production process. On average, vertical trade represents about one third of total trade among OECD countries. This report describes and illustrates new firm strategies of vertical specialisation and explores the policy implications of new patterns of trade and FDI. It is in services industries that vertical trade has increased the most in recent years. While vertical trade seems to respond to the same determinants as the rest of exports and imports, distance-related trade costs play a more important role in explaining the volume of bilateral trade flows resulting from vertical specialisation. Distance-related costs have a lower impact on foreign direct investment and sales of foreign affiliates but there is a complementary relationship between trade and FDI. Vertical specialisation networks have created new challenges for trade policymakers. In particular, growth of bilateral exchanges between countries depends increasingly on barriers to trade and investment in the rest of the world. Moreover, the impact of a country’s own trade barriers on domestic firms is significant in the context of vertical specialisation. The analysis stresses the importance of multilateral negotiations for trade and investment liberalisation.

Dynamic Gains from Trade

The post world war II era has been characterized by unprecedented growth in the world economy and progressive reduction in barriers to international trade and investment. The objective of this study is to assess to what extent the observed growth and deepening international economic integration are related. It begins by discussing the concept of dynamic gains from trade. Narrowly defined, dynamic gains are traderelated changes in the long-run rate of productivity growth. Although there is no conclusive evidence that...

Measuring the cost of international trade in services

We present a new dataset of international trade costs in services sectors. Using a theory-based methodology combined with data on domestic shipments and cross-border trade, we find that trade costs in services are much higher than in goods sectors: a multiple of two to three times in many cases. Trade costs in services have remained relatively steady over the last ten years, whereas trade costs in goods have fallen overall at an impressive rate. We also present two examples of the ways in which our dataset could be used in future work. First, we examine the impact of regional trade agreements on trade costs in services. Although we find that intra-bloc trade costs are lower than those facing outside countries, the differential is usually quite small for services, and in some cases has even been narrowing over time. This finding accords with the observation that because service sector reform is about re-regulation, “preferential” agreements tend to involve less discrimination than in goods markets. Second, we show for the first time that services sectors with lower trade costs tend to be more productive, and experience faster productivity growth. This result lines up well with the evidence from goods markets.

Analysis of the Economic Impact of Investment Provisions in Regional Trade Agreements

As countries turn more to regionalism as a means of forwarding co-operation on trade rules and other areas of policymaking, rules on investment are increasingly being incorporated into regional trade agreements (RTAs). We analyse the economic consequences of including investment provisions in trade agreements by creating an index of the extensiveness of investment provisions in RTAs and then using that index in a gravity model framework of trade and investment. The results indicate that investment provisions are positively associated with trade and, to an even greater extent, investment flows. Further, we observe an insignificant effect of bilateral investment treaties on investment flows, suggesting either that substantive investment provisions in RTAs impact trade and FDI flows more profoundly, or that the combination of substantive investment rules and provisions liberalising other parts of the economy jointly impact trade and investment more significantly. The report also includes case studies that confirm that the relationship between investment and other provisions in trade agreements is complex and depends on many factors.

FDI Spillovers and their Interrelationships with Trade

Foreign direct investment (FDI) represents an increasingly important dimension of international economic integration with global FDI flows growing faster than output over the past two decades. FDI is a particular form of investment, as it transfers knowledge as well as finance that may otherwise be unavailable in the domestic economy. This paper uses firm-level data to identify FDI spillovers across countries, sectors and time. The analysis suggests that knowledge-related spillovers from FDI vary considerably across sectors. Services industries enjoy the strongest productivity-enhancing effects of FDI, particularly through backward linkages. There is no strong evidence of horizontal productivity spillovers at the aggregate level. The results also indicate a significant and positive correlation between the degree of trade openness and output when measuring the impact of foreign presence in the domestic economy. A positive interaction is found between trade liberalisation and productivity spillovers. Thus, trade liberalisation can be seen as an important component of any reform package designed to help countries maximise the benefits of FDI.

The Paradox of ‘Preferences’: Regional Trade Agreements and Trade Costs in Services

Abstract This paper analyzes the relationship between regional trade integration and trade costs in services industries. The empirical analysis relies, on the one hand, on a dataset of theory-consistent bilateral trade costs calculated for 55 countries over the period 1999-2009 and, on the other hand, on an analysis of services commitments in 66 regional trade agreements to which these countries are parties. Despite the proliferation of services RTAs in the past decade, we find that trade costs are only slightly lower due to the impact of these agreements. In addition, we find that the trade cost reductions that do take place tend to happen before the agreement is signed. This mechanism is consistent with countries using services RTAs as a way of “locking in” reforms. Finally, we find that the preferential margin of services RTAs is quite thin: members and non-members both see slightly lower trade costs when an RTA is signed. We discuss the possible explanations for these findings in terms of the nature of services RTAs and their relationship with regulatory reform in signatory countries. Based on these results, we argue that regionalism in the case of services seems relatively non-discriminatory and does not lead to substantial trade preferences.

The Interaction between Investment and Services Chapters in Selected Regional trade Agreements

This report analyses the interactions between the investment and services chapters of 20 regional trade agreements. It classifies agreements into two broad categories of NAFTA-inspired and GATS-inspired agreements and identifies four major types of interaction between the investment and trade in services chapters. The report then looks at the implications of the services/investment interface for levels of investment protection and liberalisation.

The Impact of Pro-Competitive Reforms on Trade in Developing Countries

This report proposes an analysis of the mutually reinforcing relationship between trade, investment and competition policies and how together they impact trade in developing countries. An index of pro-competitive reforms is provided for 82 countries over the period 2001-2005. The index synthesises 13 indicators of the policy stance of countries with regard to trade, investment and competition. It is then used in quantitative analysis to determine the impact of barriers to competitive markets on trade. The results shows that there are substantial gains for developing countries in market and regulatory reforms in terms of higher trade flows and higher income per capita. Moreover, the paper further examines pro-competitive reforms in key services sectors and the extent to which trade agreements can promote them through the experience of the WTO telecoms Reference Paper. The analysis highlights that countries achieved a high degree of liberalisation in the telecoms sector and that regulatory principles of the Reference Paper were useful in promoting sound policies under domestic regulatory reforms of the sector.

Made in the World

In the past five years, the concept of “global value chain” (GVC) has become popular to describe the way firms fragment production into different stages located in different economies. The “made in the world” narrative suggests that production today is global with inputs coming from all parts of the world before being assembled into final products also shipped all over the world. The empirical basis of this story has however been questioned, suggesting that supply chains are regional rather than global. In this paper we offer a comprehensive review of the evidence based on the World Input-Output Database (WIOD), including new indicators counting the number of domestic and foreign production stages, border crossings and geographic length of the supply chains. The study covers 1995 to 2011. All evidence points in the same direction. The made in the world narrative is correct as far as the direction is concerned, but we still have a long way to go. On average, globalization proceeds at 40 kilometres a year.

Offshoring of Tasks: Taylorism Versus Toyotism

This paper contributes to the recent debate on trade in tasks, drawing on insights from the theory of the firm as well as recent developments in trade theory. Recent empirical literature suggests that between 20 and 30 per cent of all jobs in key OECD countries could be digitised and offshored. This study offers a cluster analysis which documents that offshorable and non‐offshorable tasks tend to be performed together across occupations. Therefore, when assessing the offshorability of a job, one needs to take into account all tasks being performed by the worker and the gains from fragmenting jobs versus the benefits of multi‐tasked workers (taylorism versus toyotism). Furthermore, one needs to distinguish between fragmentation of production and fragmentation of jobs.