International Economics Commons^™

Distance And Trade Elasticity: The Red Sea Crisis As A Natural Experiment, Felix C. Feldman

Economics Undergraduate Senior Theses

This paper exploits the 2023 Houthi attacks on shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the entrance to the Red Sea and the subsequent mass rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope to estimate modern-day elasticities with respect to effective trade cost. This event is unique among chokepoint disruptions as it did not lead to a complete blockage. Instead, many ships voluntarily rerouted away the area, but not all. This paper uses a structural approach to infer unobservable costs incurred by inframarginal Red Sea shippers. This paper combines a reduced-form gravity specification with a discrete route-choice model where ships select …

Analyzing The Role And Impact Of Energy Resources On The South China Sea Dispute, Adam Opp

Liberty University Journal of Statesmanship & Public Policy

The South China Sea is a critical but contested body of water that has been the source of much international debate and focus. The sea is a strategic maritime route and one of the most important waterways for regional and global trade. The South China Sea features rich natural resources such as fisheries and hydrocarbons, especially unknown amounts of oil and natural gas remaining untapped throughout the sea. Geological surveys estimate extremely lucrative quantities of oil and natural gas in the South China Sea, which drives the conflict, as nations with competing territorial claims seek to control not just the …

In The Hull Of The Uss Disregard: An Analysis Of Secretary Of State Cordell Hull’S Execution Of Foreign Policy In East Asia And The Precipitation Of Armed Conflict Between Japan And The United States, Eric B. Hawkins

Theses

The political career of Cordell Hull was motivated primarily by trade policy and the courting of Central America through the negotiation of reciprocal trade treaties that helped stabilize, for the most part, the entire Western Hemisphere. He was an obvious choice for Roosevelt’s cabinet to address economic instability. But why was he chosen for Secretary of State? The Open Door Policy, adopted by many Western nations in East Asia during the early 20th century, was a petri dish primed for the growth of political strife and international conflict. With the warnings from Hull’s predecessor, Henry Stimson, placed on the back …

How Are Global Trade Relationships Affected By Western Sanctions?, Colin A. Martinez

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

Do sanctions actually have an impact on their intended targets? This paper seeks to fill a gap in the existing literature on the effectiveness of sanctions by measuring potential impacts on the trade relationships of targeted states after the imposition of sanctions. To do so, it turns to a comprehensive dataset that combines all trade and sanctions data for each of 229 states, arranged in 23,132 dyads, from 2000 through 2019. It then examines 792 regressions using a hybrid fixed effects difference-in-difference model applied to twelve different types of sanctions, differentiated by the sanctioning state’s membership in certain groups of …

Regulatory Protection And The Role Of International Cooperation, Yuan Mei

Research Collection School Of Economics

I develop a general equilibrium framework to analyze the welfare consequences of product regulations and their international harmonization. In my model, raising product standards reduces a negative consumption externality, but also increases the marginal and fixed costs of production. When product standards are set noncooperatively, the effects of standards on other countries' wages and number of firms are not internalized, giving rise to an international inefficiency. The World Trade Organization's nondiscrimination principle of national treatment only partly addresses this inefficiency. Welfare losses from abandoning national treatment average 2.8%, whereas the maximum welfare gains from efficient cooperation average 11.8%.

How Global Value Chains Affect Economic Output And Unemployment: An Empirical Evidence From Asean Countries, Sri Juli Asdiyanti Samuda

Bulletin of Monetary Economics and Banking

This paper examines the effects of Global Value Chains on economic output and unemployment in ten ASEAN countries from 1999 to 2018. This study provides estimation using the system GMM and panel causality test to determine the effect of GVC thoroughly. The results indicate a positive and significant effect of global value chains on economic output in ASEAN countries. However, the findings also show that global value chains increase unemployment during the observation period. Heterogenous panel non-causality findings suggest that economic output does not affect the level of participation of GVC, but unemployment affects the level of participation in ten …

Dollarization In Latin America: The Effect On Macroeconomic Outcomes In El Salvador And Ecuador, John Stephen Petrich

Quantitative Social Science Undergraduate Senior Theses

This paper examines full dollarization in Latin America and the experience of El Salvador, Panama and Ecuador using the U.S. Dollar as their sole currency. This is accomplished by comparing key macroeconomic indicators in these countries to both their pre-dollarization experience and a control group of the largest economies in the region from 1986 to 2019. Special attention is paid to the comparison between El Salvador which fully dollarized and Guatemala which partially dollarized in 2001. A gravity model using a difference in differences analysis found no significant increase in bilateral trade with the United States relative to the control …

The Effect Of Free Trade Agreements On Innovation: Evidence From Us Bilateral Free Trade Agreements With Australia, Chile, Singapore, And South Korea, Cameron Stevens

CMC Senior Theses

This paper combines two datasets to identify the effect of joining a bilateral Free Trade Agreement with the United States on innovation in four select countries: Australia, Chile, Singapore, and South Korea. Using an probability concordance developed by Lybbert and Zolas (2014), I map the number of patents recorded by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) into four digit North-American-Industry-Classification-System (NAICS) codes, which are then combined with industry level trade data from the US International Trade Committee (USITC). Using a difference-in-differences regression model, I estimate that joining an FTA increases the number of annual patent filings by 44 in a …

Sino-Us Trade War, Erin Torgersen

Senior Honors Projects

China and the United States are unquestionably the two wealthiest economies in the world. These two countries alone account for almost half of the world’s wealth. As these nations battle to become the world's most powerful economy, it is no surprise high tensions have developed to complicate their relationship. China’s economy has been rapidly growing, especially in the last two decades as China is making its way towards the top of the list of strongest economies through its abundance of exports and manufacturing. Alternatively, as the U.S.’s economy has slowly decreased in the last few years, the gap between the …

Biden’S Options: Policy Recommendations On The Us-China Trade War, Marley Taylor Belanger

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

As talks of unprecedented inflation and the long-term impact of the pandemic are on the rise in the United States, it is critical to understand how the foreign policy choices of the US Government ultimately impact its economy. This paper aims to evaluate the impact of the economic tensions between the US and China as a result of the ongoing US-China Trade War. To examine the viability of proposed options, a cost-benefit analysis of Biden’s policy options is implemented based on a framework of escalation, de-escalation, or modification of the current US-China economic policy initiative. The analysis of these proposals …

Trade Liberalization And The Social Determinants Of Health: A Case Study Of Nafta's Impact On Mexico From 1994 To 2005, Maria Trubetskaya

Undergraduate Theses, Capstones, and Recitals

Given the increased transnationalization of borders and economic interdependence between countries in the Global North and South, it is imperative to address how these trends impact the health and well being of the populations involved. The conventional neoliberal economic framework, however, falls short in explaining these dynamics due to its overemphasis of proximal determinants of health as direct consequences of commodification and free market activities. In congruence with those theoretical limitations, there is a limited assessment of more distal determinants – the social determinants of health (SDOH) – that are arguably more consequential for health and are interrelated with the …

Stuck In The Middle: An Analysis Of Economic Growth And The Technological Intensity Of Exports, Aya Abdel Halim

Theses and Dissertations

Driven by the persistence of some economies’ lower-middle-income status, also known as the middle-income trap, this research aims to identify the relationship between exports and their growth rates. A Cobb-Douglass model augmented by the different types of exports is employed, and the relationship is estimated for a panel of 77 lower-middle-income economies using multiple two-step system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) model. This research’s contribution to the literature is two-fold: First, it analyzes exports from both an aggregated level (i.e., total exports) as well as at a disaggregated level by the technological intensity of exports. To add, the panel of …

Financial And Trade Relationships Between The Eurozone And China In The Age Of Resilience, Alessandro Del Ponte, Paolo Canofari, Audrey De Dominicis

Political Science Faculty Articles and Research

How did the financial and trade ties between China and the Eurozone develop in the aftermath of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis? We analyze these trends until the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Using data from the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), we examine the financial and trade dynamics between the two currency areas and analyze the related risks and opportunities. The data point to several patterns. We find that financial volatility in China has been substantially greater than in the Eurozone. Even so, the largest and strongest Eurozone economies – France and Germany- …

Between Lives And Economy: Optimal Covid-19 Containment Policy In Open Economies, Wen-Tai Hsu, Hsuan-Chih Luke Lin, Yang Han

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies optimal containment policy for combating a pandemic in an open-economy context. It does so via quantitative analyses using a model that incorporates a standard epidemiological compartmental model in a multi-country, multi-sector Ricardian model of international trade with full-fledged input-output linkages. We devise a novel approach in computing optimal national policies in the long run, and contrast these policies with a baseline in which countries maintain their current policies until vaccine availability. The welfare gains under optimal policies are asymmetric as the gains for the set of countries which should tighten up the containment measures are much larger …

Globalization And Top Income Shares, Lin Ma, Dimitrije Ruzic

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper documents empirically that access to global markets is associated with a higher executive-to-worker pay ratio within the firm. It then uses China's 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization as a trade shock to show that firms that exported to China prior to 2001 subsequently exported more, grew larger, and grew more unequal in terms of executive-to-worker pay. To evaluate analytically and quantitatively the impacts of globalization on top income inequality, this paper builds a model with heterogeneous firms, occupational choice, and executive compensation. In the model, executive compensation grows with the size of the firm, while the …

Effects Of Exposure To Chinese Imports On School Spending And Revenue From Property Tax, Yilei Bao

Honors Theses

I analyze the effect of exposure to Chinese import competition on school revenues per student from property tax, from local sources, and school expenditures per student in 676 Commuting Zones (CZ) from 1990 to 2007. I discover a negative relationship on the CZ level between exposure per worker to Chinese import competition and school expenditure per student, as well as school revenue per student from local sources. In contrast, impact on school revenue per student from property tax is not statistically significant. On average, in a given period, an increase of 1000 dollars in import exposure is related to a …

U.S.-China Bilateral Trade Flows And U.S. Employment, Tobin Hansen

CMC Senior Theses

The U.S.-China diplomatic relationship today is shaped significantly by economic factors. Recent strains of literature have expanded our understanding of how international economic policy choices have effected U.S. workers and labor markets. This paper extends this research by imposing bilateral symmetry in the trade flow calculations of previous works, which historically have considered U.S. exports globally. I build on the net-impact analysis of Feenstra, Ma, and Xu (2017b) and adopt the instrumental variable strategy used in Acemoglu et al. (2016), which uses Chinese trade flows with eight additional high-income countries to avoid endogeneity when comparing U.S.-China trade. From this analysis, …

The Impact Of 2018 Tariffs On U.S. Trade Values Across Relevant Categories, Lydia Murray

Undergraduate Economic Review

The Office of the United States Trade Representative, under the direction of President Donald Trump, has implemented protectionist tariffs to an extent not seen in the past several decades. This paper explores data from the U.S. Census Bureau to analyze how the values of U.S. imports and exports have differed from what would have been expected for 2018 in the absence of tariffs. This is done by using past years’ data to create a predictive curve for 2018 trade values across several different product categories, which have been subject to tariffs. The general finding of this paper is that the …

The Role Of The State In International Trade Theory And Policy: Historical Evidence From South Korea And Brazil, Sumaiya Nehla Saif

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the early 1980s, the economic performance of individual countries has been increasingly dependent on global dynamics. Neoliberal policies, including free trade, have been fostered by the global community for both mature and developing economies, led by the view that free markets constitute the driving force of economic growth and development. Accordingly, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) - in addition to the developments within mainstream economic theory - have contributed to portray the state as the carrier of inefficiencies and market distortions, which prevent the unfolding of economic freedom and …

Did Dr-Cafta Affect The Exports Of The Dominican Republic To The United States?, Maria Ivanova Reyes Peguero, Asger V. Hansen

Economics Faculty Publications

This article evaluates the impact the Dominican Republic and Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) had on the exports of the Dominican Republic (DR) to the United States. We estimate a gravity model for the DR exports to the 109 trade partners of the country from 1990 to 2014. This model quantifies the effect of the DR-CAFTA since 2007, when the agreement was ratified, and finds that the DR-CAFTA negatively affected DR exports to the US. We conduct further analysis of factors that could explain the decline in exports, in spite of the ratification of the agreement. We find that …

Trade Rout: As Trade Tensions Built Between U.S. And Canada, This American Border Town Felt The Freeze, Matt Cutler, Isaac Carey

Capstones

A close business relationship with Canada has allowed Plattsburgh to thrive as a manufacturing town. Over 100 Quebec-based companies operate there, and 15 percent of the workforce in the county gets its paycheck from a Canadian company. Even more impressive, this comes at a time when manufacturing jobs are declining nationwide. While factories are shutting down across the rust belt, in Plattsburgh they are opening up.

There is just one problem.

All of this was made possible by the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. And just this April, the Trump administration abruptly threatened to pull out of the …

Three Essays On Population Dynamics, Trade And Growth, Anna Maximova

Theses and Dissertations--Economics

Changes in immigration patterns and differential fertility choices shape the economies of both developed and developing countries. However, these changes affect the economies of developed and developing nations in different ways. This study aims to understand the changes in population dynamics, brought about by differences in cross--country differential fertility choices and migration patterns, and how these changes affect economic development via the channels of international trade and cross--country human capital accumulation.

Chapter 1 discusses the background, data and literature on the patterns and composition of immigration and international trade, which are further explored in Chapter 2 for the world sample …

Contents

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Financial Openness And Trade Volatility In Argentina, Joseph H. Asciuto

Master's Theses

This paper will identify the relationship between financial openness and trade volatility in Argentina. Data spanning 1970-2011 provided by the IMF, WTO, and INDEC will be used to construct a panel dataset for both a global analysis and a sectoral analysis for the Argentine economy. The application of established and accepted techniques to the constructed dataset will show a negative correlation between trade volatility and financial openness; thus, financial openness acts as a stabilizing mechanism for trade. Additional analysis will be performed on the of role regional trade agreements as stabilization mechanisms for trade. A significant implication of this study …

Evaluating Stolper-Samuelson: Trade Liberalization & Wage Inequality In India, Anthony M. Michael

Master's Theses

This paper tests the predictions of the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem in India after it underwent major trade reform in 1991. Using industry level tariff data, the paper empirically examines trade liberalization’s effect on the wages of high-skilled labor relative to low skilled labor within firms. The study finds empirical evidence to support growing wage differentials within firms, which contradict the predictions of the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem. Additionally, when controlling for firm size and the effects of the global financial crisis, these results remain robust. Finally, the paper explores training and welfare and R&D’s effect on the wage differentials within firms, finding a …

The Shochu Conundrum: Economics And Gatt Article Iii, Alex Davis

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper will discuss the National Treatment (NT) obligation contained in Article III of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 1994 as applied in precedential tax discrimination cases. Case law has not taken a firm stance on the economic versus legal interpretation of the likeness/directly competitive or substitutable (DCS) criterion or the principle of “so as to afford protection” (SATAP) captured in Article III.2. After examining the case law on discriminatory taxation, I conclude that the NT obligation in trade agreements is imperfect. Nonetheless, NT is a critical component of these agreements, and the international trade order would …

Energy Price Shocks And External Balances, Bao Tan Huynh

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies the impact of a wide set of energy price shocks on exter- nal balances using a two-country framework comprising multiple sectors and en- dogenous energy production with convex costs. The paper disentangles different demand and supply shocks in the energy market through their distinct impact on external balances. It provides a theoretical confirmation of Kilian et al. (2009) and a theoretical foundation to the determining role of the non-energy trade balance in the transmission of energy price shocks. The presence of durables also highlights the immediate channel through which energy prices impact the non-energy trade balance.

Unemployment And Economic Integration For Developing Countries, Haiwen Zhou

Economics Faculty Publications

While financial or trade integration between countries may increase the size of the market and aid the adoption of more advanced technologies, will it also increase the level of urban unemployment for a developing country? In this model, there is unemployment in the urban sector. Manufacturing firms engage in oligopolistic competition and choose increasing returns technologies to maximize profits. Financial firms provide capital to manufacturing firms and they also engage in oligopolistic competition. We show that an increase in the wage rate in the manufacturing sector changes neither the level of technology nor the level of employment in the manufacturing …

Trade, Competitiveness And Employment In The Global Economy, Susan N. Houseman

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Do African Immigrants Enhance Their Home Nations’ Trade With Their Hosts?, Roger White, Bedassa Tadesse

Economics

Employing data on the immigrant stocks of 43 African home countries who reside in 110 host countries and on trade flows between these countries during the year 2005, we examine whether African immigrants exert positive effects on their home countries’ trade with the typical host country. Estimates from Tobit regression models indicate a one percent increase in the number of African immigrants in a given host country increases that country’s exports to and imports from the typical home country by 0.132 percent and 0.259 percent, respectively. Further evaluation of these effects from the perspective of each African home country reveals …