Measuring global and regional trade integration in terms of concentration of access

Abstract

I apply concentration measures from the inequality literature - the Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient - to the measurement of global and regional integration, and show that these can be derived from the theoretical gravity model in the presence of unequal costs of access for firms from different locations to a particular market. Overall, comparing 9 economies, I find that the USA is the most globalised on these measures, and India and China are the least globalised. The smaller EU economies, which are very open on standard measures, should probably be viewed as regionalised rather than globalised