Analysis of the Role of Tariff Concessions in East Asia

While there are many studies focusing on the impacts of various trade policy agreements across the world in the recent years, there is not much focus in the literature on the extent to which these agreements are implemented later, in terms of the aspects agreed upon therein. In this paper, we firstly identify the past achievements of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) in East Asian regions in terms of tariff removals and suggest future rooms for further economic benefits from trade liberalization in the region. Secondly, we provide the tariff concession dataset in the GTAP Data Base, which distinguishes the tariff removals agreed in these EPAs in East Asia but not implemented yet, from the existing overall tariffs in the benchmark year. As the standard GTAP Data Base only incorporates enforced tariff reductions through the base year applied tariffs, to analyse future trade integration, it might be worth it to integer commitments that are not yet implemented. We do that at the HS6 levels for East Asian EPAs that allows us to compare the economic impacts of partial versus complete implementation of the trade liberalization agreed in East Asian EPAs. Our results suggest that taking those commitments into account economically matters and that such satellite dataset might be taken as actual baseline for future policy simulations.JEL Classification Codes: D58, F13, F14, F15, F17The earlier version of this study was presented at the 18th Annual Conference on Global Economic Analysis on 17-19 June, 2015 in Melbourne

Has China displaced the outward investments of OECD countries?

As China has rapidly emerged as one of the world's largest investors abroad, there has been a hectic debate in the literature on whether its emergence as a major foreign investor may have undermined the importance of western industrialised economies, including those in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This paper aims to investigate whether this is the case. The study uses a panel dataset covering 155 countries, including 33 in the OECD, where China had invested during 2003–09. This is by far the most comprehensive dataset of China's outward foreign direct investment (OFDI). A two-stage least squared (TSLS) regression approach is adopted for our econometric models according to an established augmented gravity model in the literature. The empirical results show clear evidence that China's OFDI displaces that of the OECD countries, but the argument that China's emergence is a ‘new colonialism’ is not supported as OECD countries' OFDI in resource abundant host countries, particularly that in Africa and Latin America, does not appear to have been displaced by China's OFDI

MARMOTTE : a Multinational Model

MARMOTTE;CGEM;Macroeconomics;Models;Economic policy;Euro;Econometrics

Foreign market conditions and export performance: does ‘crowdedness’ reduce exports?

This paper analyzes the link between firm exports and the competitive environment in foreign markets. We derive a theory-based econometric specification linking market-specific exports to foreign demand and the degree of a market's `crowdedness,' which depends on the number and efficiency of firms competing there and the barriers impeding their access. Estimates on a large sample of Italian firms indicate that increased crowdedness has reduced Italian exports, but only by 0.2%-0.3% per year. This is substantially less than the contribution of other factors such as higher unit labour costs or weak demand growth in the EU15