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...