Narrow Results

This paper investigates bilateral intra-industry trade between the United States and its major trading partners over the period 1995–2008. Intra-industry trade (IIT) is decomposed into horizontal (HIIT) and vertical (VIIT) components. HIIT dominates the total two-way trade of the United States and its share relative to VIIT has been rising over time, particularly with neighbouring trade partners and with China. Using pooled panel data, country-level determinants of IIT, HIIT and VIIT are investigated. The results, overall, tend to conform with a priori expectations and provide empirical support for a number of propositions suggested by theory. Findings indicate that the relative similarity of the economies of trading partners, their geographical proximity, FDI and overall market size are important influences on bilateral HIIT flows for the United States. VIIT, on the other hand, is found to be driven in large part by economic differences between partners as well as the market size and closeness of trading partners.

In this paper we explore the BACI-CEPII database using Network Analysis. From the visualization of the World Trade Network, we define and describe its topology, both in its binary version and in its weighted version, by calculating and discussing a number of the commonly used network statistics. We finally discuss various specific topics that can be studied with Network Analysis and International Trade data, both at the aggregated and at the sectorial level. The analysis is carried out with multiple software (Stata, R and Pajek). The scripts to replicate part of the analysis are included in the appendix and can be used as a hands-on tutorial. Moreover, local and global centrality measures, based on the unweighted and the weighted version of the aggregated World Trade Network, have been calculated for each country (178 in total) and each year (from 1995 to 2010) and can be downloaded from the CEPII webpage.

Despite economic theory and empirical literature that have shown that wide availability of business services contributes significantly to productivity gains and growth, economic modelers have been slow to meaningfully incorporate services into their models. This paper employs a 52-sector, small, open-economy computable general equilibrium model of the Tanzanian economy to assess the impact of the liberalization of regulatory barriers against foreign and domestic business service providers in Tanzania. The model incorporates foreign direct investment in services, and productivity effects in both goods and services markets endogenously through a Dixit-Stiglitz framework. The paper summarizes and builds on the surveys and policy notes of the regulatory regimes in business services in Tanzania, and estimates the ad valorem equivalent of barriers to foreign direct investment. The paper estimates significant gains to Tanzania from services reforms, especially in banking, maritime and road transportation Decomposition exercises reveal that the largest gains will derive from liberalization of non-discriminatory regulatory barriers.