International Economics

<< N°154

  N°154  
Issue Q2 2018  
The revealed cost competitiveness of changing trade patterns: A country-sector exercise  
Massimo Del Gatto
 
In new trade models with heterogenous firms, trade liberalization between high-cost and low-cost countries is expected, all the rest equal, to increase cost competitiveness (i.e., to decrease real marginal costs) relatively more in the former. We report evidence in favour of this prediction for a sample of countries, accounting for about 85% of world trade, from the 1980s to the 2000s. The estimation of the country-sector changes in cost competitiveness (relative to the UK) hinges on taking advantage of the observability of international trade patterns to reveal information on cross-country differences in marginal costs, hence ‘revealed’ cost competitiveness. Abstract

   
Firm selection ; Gravity equation ; Import competition ; Keywords
F12 ; F14 ; F15 ; O47 ; JEL classification
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