Global Economy Journal

If a goal of immigration reform is to lessen the flow of unauthorized immigrants into the U.S., could international trade be used to deter immigration rather than adopting legal barriers? The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on this question by considering the theoretical foundations and empirical research regarding the connection between trade and migration.

China-bashing has become a popular US media and political sport. This is largely due to the US trade imbalance and the belief, by some, that China is responsible for it because it manipulates its currency to hold down the dollar prices of its goods, unfairly creating a trade advantage that has contributed to the loss of US businesses and jobs. This paper reviews the problem of the large trade imbalance that the United States has with China and its relationship to Chinese exchange rate policy. It examines the link between a Chinese renminbi appreciation and the trade balance and also whether a generalized dollar decline could solve the global or Chinese US trade imbalance. The consensus view explained here is that a renminbi appreciation is not likely to fix either the trade imbalance with China or overall. If these perceived benefits of a managed float are small or non-existent, then perhaps they should be pursued anyway because of small costs or even benefits for China. Section IV looks at the costs of a managed float in terms of the benefits of the earlier peg. Opponents of a fixed dollar/yuan exchange rate ignore the costs of a managed float for China, especially with limits on currency convertibility. These costs are outlined here in order to provide an economic basis for the earlier fixed rate and China’s reluctance to appreciate. Finally it is suggested that the necessary convertibility on capital account, toward which China is moving, could easily result in yuan depreciation under a floating rate regime. This is hardly the end that China critics have in mind and it is not one that would improve US or other trade imbalances with China.

Using panel data for the period 1970-97, I examine the relation between a developing country's trade openness and the stock of its FDI liabilities. The paper makes two contributions. First, I find that trade openness is positively correlated with FDI liabilities, with or without country fixed effects. Moreover, this correlation remains robust to the inclusion of additional variables on the right hand side, such as GDP per capita, inflation, institutional quality, macroeconomic volatility and measures of capital controls. Secondly, I show that the source of this correlation is causality from FDI to trade openness, rather than the other way around. To establish this, I run IV regressions first with FDI as the dependent variable, and trade liberalization dates instrumenting for trade openness, and then with trade openness as the dependent variable, and bilateral investment treaties signed by countries instrumenting for FDI. I find that trade liberalization increases trade openness, but predicted trade openness has no explanatory power for FDI liabilities. On the other hand, the number of bilateral investment treaties signed by a country significantly increases its stock of FDI liabilities, and the predicted stock of FDI liabilities has significant explanatory power for trade openness. This is an important finding because the standard approach so far in the literature has been to include trade openness on the right hand side of regressions (with the left hand side involving some measure of FDI liabilities), thereby implicitly assigning to it a causal role. My paper shows that this practice introduces endogeneity bias in the regression coefficients.

The exchange rate pass-through for Nigeria imports is estimated by applying an econometric procedure to sectoral data which avoids the pit-falls in previous studies. We use the mark-up approach, which implies setting export prices as a mark-up on production costs. So, the price facing importers is the exchange rate adjusted production costs where mark-up depends on the competitive pressures in the import's market and the nominal exchange rate. Our results indicate incomplete pass-through at varying degrees across sectors, which implies that the foreign exporters passed on only part of the increase in their costs of production to import prices. Also, it reveals that the effort of the Nigerian government in encouraging companies to use local inputs where possible instead of relying on imported intermediate inputs is gradually yielding positive results. Important policy implications that follow from our results of incomplete pass-through to domestic prices could influence CBN forecasts of future path of inflation, a key element in the conduct of monetary policy. Indeed, the successful implementation of monetary policy presupposes that CBN has not only a good understanding of inflation dynamics but is also relatively successful at predicting the future path of inflation. Also, our results imply that the exchange rate policy may be a blunt instrument when used to restore external balance since relative price adjustments will be limited. Furthermore, the incomplete pass-through suggests that exchange rate changes are likely to lead to smaller real effects on the economy through lower changes in both the terms of trade and import volumes and finally, the extent of inflation (deflation) effects of exchange rate depreciation (appreciation) operating through changes in the prices of imported goods will be moderated.

South Florida is an area where entrepreneurship is very much alive. South Florida is a new frontier; a hundred-year-old region than is constantly changing, growing and evolving as it carves out new niches through the mobility of its local and foreign entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurship manifested locally has opened new frontiers for the region and, as a consequence, for frontiers all over the world. Entrepreneurship opportunities challenge South Floridians to sink or swim in the turbulent waters of international trade and finance.The main objective in this article is to explore the contribution of entrepreneurship and other variables to the economy of South Florida. Although entrepreneurship has played in the past and continues to have at present, a very important role in the area's economy, its future position is far from being assured.

This paper investigates the synchronization of the intra-East Asian business cycles based on regional bilateral trade statistics. By evaluating three macroeconomic fundamentals: real GDP, industrial production, and unemployment, it is found that tighter intra-East Asian trade may most likely lead to more idiosyncratic business cycles and hence lower correlations of economic activity. When using regional trade as an international openness criterion in the theory of Optimum Currency Area, the finding suggests that for the immediate future, the creation of an East Asian monetary/currency union may not be feasible.