In less than three decades, China has grown from playing a negligible role in world trade to being one of the world's largest exporters, a substantial importer of raw materials, intermediate outputs, and other goods, and both a recipient and source of foreign investment. Not surprisingly, China's economic dynamism has generated considerable attention and concern in the United States and beyond.
This paper analyzes China's experience under U.S. apparel and textile quotas. It makes use of a new database that tracks U.S. trading partners' performance under the quota regimes established by the global Multifiber Arrangement (1974 to 1995) and subsequent Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (1995 to 2005). We find that China was relatively more constrained under these regimes than other countries and that, as quotas were lifted, China's exports grew disproportionately. When the ATC finally ended in 2005, China's exports surged while those from nearly all other regions fell.
New goods play a central role in many trade and growth models. We use detailed trade and firm-level data from India to investigate the relationship between declines in trade costs, imports of intermediate inputs and domestic firm product scope. We estimate substantial gains from trade through access to new imported inputs. Moreover, we find that lower input tariffs account on average for 31 percent of the new products introduced by domestic firms.
Recent theoretical work predicts that an important margin of adjustment to deregulation or trade reforms is the reallocation of output within firms through changes in their product mix. Empirical work has accordingly shifted its focus towards multi-product firms and their product mix decisions. Existing studies have however focused exclusively on the U.S.
We examine the influence of an interstate network created by intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) on the global diffusion of democracy. We propose that IGOs facilitate democracy's diffusion by transmitting information between member states and by interpreting that information according to prevailing norms in the world society, where democracy is viewed as the legitimate form of government. We employ a network autocorrelation model to track changes in democracy among all of the world's countries from 1815 to 2000.
How does competition affect innovation? We address this question by using a novel approach to measure quality—an important component of innovation—using highly disaggregated product data for a large set of countries. Constructing an internationally comparable measure of quality enables us to separate the effect of reducing import tariffs, our measure of competition, on quality upgrading from other country level differences in competitive environments, and product demand shocks.
This paper examines the relation between ownership, corporate form, and innovation for a cross-section of private and publicly traded innovating firms in the US and 15 European countries. A striking novel observation emerges from our analysis: while most innovating firms in the US are publicly traded conglomerates, a substantial fraction of innovation is concentrated in private firms and in business groups in continental European countries.
This paper studies the value of external commitment to policy reforms in the case of WTO/GATT accessions. The accessions often entail reforms that go beyond narrowly defined trade liberalization, and have to overcome fierce resistance in the acceding countries, as reflected in protracted negotiations. We study the growth and investment consequences of WTO/GATT accessions, with attention to a possible selection bias. We find that the accessions tend to raise income, but only for those countries that were subject to rigorous accession procedures.