Top Research Papers on International Trade

We use de-identified data from Facebook to construct a new and publicly available measure of the pairwise social connectedness between 170 countries and 332 European regions. We find that two countries trade more when they are more socially connected, especially for goods where information frictions may be large. The social connections that predict trade in specific products are those between the regions where the product is produced in the exporting country and the regions where it is used in the importing country. Once we control for social connectedness, the estimated effects of geographic ...

[Download latest version] ABSTRACT ————————————————————————————————————-This paper studies the extent to which frictions in financial markets affect aggregate trade flows. I study a model of firm dynamics with financial frictions and international trade, calibrated to match key features of firm-level data. I find that, while financial frictions have a large effect on the pattern and extent of international trade at the industry-level, as documented in the literature, they have a small effect on trade at the aggregate-level. Relaxing the financial constraints allows more firms to finance the up...

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This work investigates country-level trade resilience during the 1st wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, employing Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to identify configurations of country- level factors based on their effectiveness in engendering trade resilience.

The United Nations has adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 targets. International trade has substantial influences on global sustainability and human well-being. However, little is known about the impacts of international trade on progress towards achieving the SDG targets. Here we show that international trade positively affected global progress towards achieving nine environment-related SDG targets. International trade improved the SDG target scores of most (65%) of the evaluated developed countries but reduced the SDG target scores of over 60% of the evaluated developin...

International trade separates consumption of goods from related environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and land-use change (together referred to as “land-use emissions”). Through use of new emissions estimates and a multiregional input-output model, we evaluated land-use emissions embodied in global trade from 2004 to 2017. Annually, 27% of land-use emissions and 22% of agricultural land are related to agricultural products ultimately consumed in a different region from where they were produced. Roughly three-quarters of embodied emissions are from land-use ...

Abstract We study the effect of algorithmic trading (AT) on market quality between 2001 and 2011 in 42 equity markets around the world. We use an exchange colocation service that increases AT as an exogenous instrument to draw causal inferences about AT on market quality. On average, AT improves liquidity and informational efficiency but increases short-term volatility. Importantly, AT also lowers execution shortfalls for buy-side institutional investors. Our results are surprisingly consistent across markets and thus across a wide range of AT environments. We further document that the benefic...

This paper introduces and describes the new International Trade and Production Database that can be used for statistical estimation (ITPD-E). The ITPD-E contains consistent data on international and domestic trade for 243 countries, 170 industries, and 17 years. The data are constructed at the industry level covering agriculture, mining, energy, manufacturing, and services, so that the ITPD-E describes nearly completely the traded sectors of each economy. The time period covered commences in 2000 and extends to 2016. The ITPD-E is constructed using reported administrative data and intentionall...

Abstract We quantify the criticality of the world’s 1300 most important ports for global supply chains by predicting the allocation of trade flows on the global maritime transport network, which we link to a global supply-chain database to evaluate the importance of ports for the economy. We find that 50% of global trade in value terms is maritime, with low-income countries and small islands being 1.5 and 2.0 times more reliant on their ports compared to the global average. The five largest ports globally handle goods that embody >1.4% of global output, while 40 ports add >10% of domesti...

We study the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on Euro Area inflation and how it compares to the experiences of other countries, such as the United States, over the two-year period 2020-21. Our model-based calibration exercises deliver four key results: 1) Compositional effects – the switch from services to goods consumption – are amplified through global input-output linkages, affecting both trade and inflation. 2) Inflation can be higher under sector-specific labor shortages relative to a scenario with no such supply shocks. 3) Foreign shocks and global supply chain bottlenecks played an outsi...

This work focuses on hunger reduction through international trade under alternative trade scenarios for a wide range of climate futures and assesses the adaptation effect of trade and climate-induced specialization patterns.

The results indicate that renewable energy consumption improved to environmental quality and policies to promote renewables can provide for economic growth and environmental sustainability and ensure crucial sustainable development goals.

Trade agreements are a major determinant of the operation of food systems. Here, we examine how different aspects of trade
\ncan constrain or enable governments’ ability to implement food system-level actions aimed at enhancing nutrition and mitigating climate change. Concerning technical aspects, we focus on the potential impact of trade agreements on three major strategies for transforming food systems—namely the removal of market barriers for agricultural commodities, the protection of
\nregulatory policy space and the revision of subsidies. Concerning non-technical aspects, we revi...

Increasing pressure on the world's freshwater resources raises serious concerns about global food security and the sustainability of water use in agriculture. Here we quantify and map at a 5-arcmin spatial resolution the blue water footprint of each country's national consumption and where they infringe sustainable environmental flows as defined by the presumptive environmental flow standard or the 80% rule, in which runoff depletion by more than 20% will pose risk to ecosystems. We find that 52% of the blue water footprint of global consumption and 43% of international blue virtual water flow...

This study investigates how the effects of COVID-19 on international trade changed over time. To do that, we explore monthly data on worldwide trade from January to August in 2019 and 2020. Specifically, our study data include the exports of 34 countries to 173 countries. We estimated the gravity equation by employing various variables as a proxy for the COVID-19 damage. Our findings can be summarized as follows: First, regardless of our measures to quantify the COVID-19 pandemic, we found significantly negative effects of COVID-19 on the international trade of both exporting and importing cou...

Both the direct and indirect roles of trade on biological invasions, as well as their interaction, are examined for the first time.

With economic development, there is a growing demand for food and manufactured products that put direct pressure on air and soil quality, limiting sustainable development. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) formulated by the United Nations establish 17 objectives that guide public policies within countries. The achievement of the SDG6, SDG7, SDG11, SDG12, SDG14 and SDG15 goals, which are totally or partially related to environmental quality, depends mainly on the ability to generate new processes and industrial products friendly to the environment. Innovation arising from research and de...

There are overwhelming proofs that world-wide carbon emission profiles have been substantially shaped by carbon leakage through international trade. However, it has been unclear how structure and functions of the global carbon transfers evolve in terms of a complex network. Therefore, this study applies a series of network tools to depict the evolution features of the global carbon flow network from 1995 to 2011 as supported by a systems multi-regional input-output analysis. At global level, the network density increases essentially, indicating the widely expanding carbon leakages among econom...

Abstract The COVID‐19 pandemic has put unprecedented strain on food supply chains. Given the ever‐increasing degree of globalization, those supply chains very often stretch across international borders. In the short run, countries have largely been working to keep those supply chains intact and operating efficiently so that panic buying is cooled and shifts in consumption habits arising from personal isolation can be accommodated. Once the crisis has passed, based on what has been learned regarding the international food system's resilience, governments may wish to strengthen institutions that...

Striving to feed a population set to reach almost 10 billion people by 2050 in a sustainable way is high on the research and policy agendas. Further intensification and expansion of agricultural lands would be of major concern for the environment and biodiversity. There is, therefore, a need to understand better the impacts on biodiversity from the global food system. Since biodiversity underpins functions and services that are essential to agriculture, greater consideration of the role of biodiversity in the food system is needed. Here we have generated a conceptual framework separating the e...

Hydrogen as a low-carbon clean energy source is experiencing a global resurgence and has been recognized as an alternative energy carrier that can help bring the world to a carbon neutral future. However, getting to scale is one of the main challenges limiting the growth of the hydrogen economy. In particular, the high cost of transporting green hydrogen is bottlenecking the international trading and wider adoption of hydrogen for global carbon natural objectives. In order to explore incentives for the global hydrogen economy and develop new pathways towards the carbon neutral future, the conc...

The empirical results suggest that the less political risk help to mitigate while the lower financial, economic, and composite risk increase CCO2 emissions in selected RCEP economies during the period of 1990 to 2020.

The authors use genomic and trade data to investigate a pandemic in the 1980s, finding evidence that international trade of breeding stocks led to global spread of the pathogen.

Economic development in a contemporary setting encompasses a broad range of parameters. This balanced panel study of 30 countries uses two single-equation models to investigate the impacts of natural resource abundance, international trade, financial development, trade openness and institutional quality on two proxies for economic development – economic growth and a human development index. The data spans from 1990 to 2016 and the impact is assessed in aggregate as well as the countries' level of development in three groups – Lower-middle, Upper-middle and High Income Countries. Four panel est...

This paper mainly investigates the impact of urbanization and international trade on CO2 across 65 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Countries from 2000 to 2016. The non-linear nexus between urbanization and CO2 emissions is explored through panel quantile regression. Different effects of exports and imports on CO2 is analyzed and compared across different income groups. 2SLS (2-stages least square) regression is employed to handle the endogeneity issue. The results confirmed an inverted U-shaped relationship between urbanization and CO2 emissions only in high income group, which is consistent wi...

This study aimed to investigate the relationships between blockchain adoption barriers and identified the salient stakeholders for blockchain adoption in containerized international trade and found that the most impactful among the eight barriers are lack of support from influential stakeholders, lack of understanding regarding blockchain, and lack of government regulations.

Abstract The study tests the EKC hypothesis, forecasts future paths, and models the dynamic relationship between ecological and economic variables in China. The problem of sustainable and green growth in China arises with the rebirth of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) program. Although there has been various research on the subject, the basic EKC model results are often conflicting. To obtain consistent parameter estimates, the basic EKC model was extended; the study’s contributions or novelties include avoiding the omitted variable bias by introducing urbanisation rate and international tr...

This study suggests total import and export as complex indicator of COVID-19 transmission dynamics that outclasses other common parameters used to justify the CO VID-19 spread, given by economic, demographic, environmental, and climate factors.

To explore the unidentified determinants of CO2 emissions in G7 countries from 1990 to 2017, this study uses second-generation panel co-integration methodologies and confirms a stable long-run relationship amongCO2 emissions, trade, income, environmental innovation and renewable energy consumption.

Abstract The global economy is rising continuously, with a 3–4% aggregate annual growth in output, which poses a severe threat to the environment due to a consistent rise in the use of fossil fuel. Given the disastrous climate change due to the industrialization and increasingly growing demands for energy, countries around the globe are devising strategies to curb the release of greenhouse gases . This study examines the role of environmental innovation, trade, and renewable energy consumption in the nexus between trade and CO 2 emissions for top 10 carbon emitter countries. The results sugges...

It is revealed that CO2 emissions have a negative long-run relationship with trade exclusively for developed countries, while they have a positive long- run relationship with FDI inflows solely for developing countries.

This paper evaluates the link between economic growth, renewable energy, tourism arrivals, trade openness, and carbon dioxide emissions in the European Union (EU-28). As an econometric strategy, the research uses panel data. In the first step, we apply the unit root test, and the results demonstrated that the variables used in this study are integrated I (1) in the first difference. In the second step, we apply the Pedroni cointegration test, and Kao Residual cointegration test, and we observe that the variables are cointegrated in the long run. The panel fully modified least squares (FMOLS), ...

Abstract In the context of trade protectionism impacting economic and environmental sustainability, a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of trade on carbon emissions is critical to economic and environmental sustainability. Existing literature mainly explores the impact of trade on carbon emissions from the perspective of trade openness, neglecting the perspectives of trade diversification and trade direction. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating the impact of trade openness (measured by trade volume, import, and export), and trade diversification (measured by import d...

This paper examines the impact of a carbon trading pilot policy on the low-carbon international competitiveness of an industry to test whether creating a carbon market causes the Porter effect. Using a sample of 33 industries in 30 provinces in China from 2009 to 2016 with a difference-in-difference-in-difference model (DDD) and a series of robustness tests, we find evidence of a significant positive influence of a carbon trading pilot policy on the low-carbon international competitiveness of industries covered by the pilot programs. Research on its influencing mechanism reveals that a carbon ...

Environmental sustainability is the most crucial concern of the world. The existing literature has documented various factors that can play a remedial role in fixing the gregarious carbon emissions issue; however, little is known regarding consumption-based emissions. Trade diversification is one of the potential remedies for carbon emission reduction, enhancing economic growth and reducing trade risk and volatility by structural changes in critical production and development. Similarly, green innovation accelerates energy efficiency and improves environmental quality . However, in previous st...

This book discusses the business case for Quantitative Trading, how to identify a Strategy that suits you, and the importance of minimizing Transaction Costs.

This study aims to investigate the decoupling impact of trade on carbon emissions and under what circumstances trade would contribute to decoupling carbon emissions. A combination of Tapio decoupling model and structural threshold model is developed to study and quantify the impact. The empirical study uses panel data for 124 countries around the world from 2000 to 2018. The results show that the main state of the relationship between trade openness, economic growth and carbon emissions was weak decoupling. Moreover, there are two breakpoints in the impact of trade openness on carbon emissions...

Trade policy uncertainty (TPU) has become an important source of economic uncertainty and research. We review the main sources and measures of TPU. We then provide a conceptual framework for modeling TPU and methods for estimating and quantifying its effects. We analyze its role in trade agreements and discuss open questions for future research.

We study the financial implications of the 2018–2019 U.S.-China trade war for global supply chains. Around the dates when higher tariffs are announced, U.S. firms that depend more on exports to and imports from China experience larger declines in market value, with the negative effect spilling over to the affected firms' suppliers and customers through production networks. The trade war effect is mainly concentrated among U.S. firms that sell to Chinese customers with low R&D intensity or outsource to Chinese differentiated input suppliers. We also exploit the within-firm variation in tariff e...

This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 on trading volume in stock markets around the world. We document a large spike in trading volume in 37 international equity markets. The surge in trading volume is found to be associated with the national culture and institutional environment of individual countries. In particular, investors tend to trade more heavily in societies characterized by a higher level of trust and individualism, as well as a lower level of uncertainty avoidance. Investors are also more willing to trade in wealthier nations, as well as those with stronger protection of legal...