Trade Mispricing and Illicit Flows

A potential vehicle to move capital unrecorded out of a country is the misinvoicing of international trade transactions. Exporters may understate the export revenue on their invoices and importers may overstate import expenditures, while their trading partners are instructed to deposit the balance for their benefit in a foreign account. Aiming to quantify the extent of trade mispricing, studies have analyzed asymmetries in matched partner trade statistics or examined price anomalies in transaction level price data. This paper critically reviews these empirical approaches and briefly describes an alternative methodology. Overall, the accuracy and reliability of estimates of illicit financial flows based on trade mispricing are questioned. In particular, it is argued that estimates of trade mispricing are critically dependent on assumptions on how to interpret observed asymmetries in trade statistics. For instance, various reasons for discrepancies in bilateral trade statistics are discussed, and incentives for faking trade invoices other than capital flight are highlighted. Also, aggregate trade data may mask considerable variation in trade discrepancies at the transaction level. Most notably, the importance of trade mispricing as a method for the unrecorded cross-border transfer of capital is generally unclear.

Trade and wages: choosing among alternative explanations

North-South trade competition cannot be an explanation for the adverse trend for U.S. unskilled wages. If wage competition in these industries from abroad pushed down wages, then prices of these goods should also have gone down, and they have not. Also VERs and anti-dumping measures have protected exactly the wage earners supposedly threatened.International trade ; Labor turnover ; Labor unions ; Wages

Did the Multi-fiber Agreement Make the NAFTA Politically More Acceptable? A Theoretical Analysis.

The central question addressed in this paper is whether the presence of the MFA made the NAFTA politically more acceptable. Assuming that the government maximizes a weighted sum of welfare and producer profits, we derive four key results. First, taking the initial level of trade restriction as exogenously given, it is possible for an FTA to be endorsed by both parties under the MFA-like quota in one country though it is unambiguously rejected under a tariff that provides equal protection. Second, if the initial MFA quota is itself chosen endogenously, as long as all quota rents accrue to exporting countries, the quota is set so as to yield either autarky or free trade. Third, an intermediate outcome can obtain if quota rents are shared between the trading partners as is true, for example, under a tariff quota. Depending on the degree of the government’s bias in favor of producers, this outcome may be more or less restrictive than that obtained under a tariff. Finally, assuming parameter values that give rise to the intermediate outcome initially, it remains possible for an FTA to be endorsed under the MFA-type quota when it is turned down by one of the potential partners under a tariff. But it is now also possible for the opposite to happen: an FTA that is endorsed under a tariff may be turned down under the MFA-type quota.

Outward-Orientation and Development: Are Revisionists Right

The costs of import substitution (IS) as a strategy for industrialization, which was deemed synonymous with economic development by many development economists of the fifties and sixties, were shown to be substantial in the influential and nuanced studies of the seventies and eighties under the auspices of OECD, NBER and World Bank. These studies played a critical role in shifting policies in several developing countries away from the IS strategy. Recently there has been a proliferation of cross country regressions as a methodology of analysis of issues relating to growth, trade and other issues. Both proponents (e.g. Sachs and Warner (1995)) and opponents (Rodriguez and Rodrik (1999)) of the view that openness to trade is linked to higher growth have relied on such regressions. The paper systematically reviews the theoretical and empirical studies on such linkage. It rejects the cross-country regression methodology for reasons of their weak theoretical foundation, poor quality of their data base and their inappropriate econometric methodologies. It argues that the most compelling evidence on this issue can come only from careful case studies of policy regimes of individual entries such as those of OECD, NBER and World Bank. It concludes that the virtues of openness established in these nuanced in-depth studies remain unrefuted.Developing Countries, Economic Development, Economic Growth, International Trade, Openness, Import Substitution, Export Promotion, Cross-Country Regressions

The Muddles over Outsourcing

Critics have muddled the public debate over offshore outsourcing by using the term interchangeably to refer to altogether different phenomena such as on-line purchase of services, direct foreign investment and, sometimes, all imports. We argue that clarity requires distinguishing among these various phenomena and define outsourcing explicitly as the services trade at arm's length that does not require geographical proximity of the buyer and the seller—the so-called Mode 1 services in the WTO terminology—conducted principally via the electronic mediums such as the telephone, fax and Internet. The definition is appropriate because this is the phenomenon that is relatively new and scary in public consciousness and has fueled the recent “outsourcing” debate. Under this definition, the total number of the U.S. jobs outsourced annually is minuscule and is expected to remain so over the next decade, even on a gross basis (i.e., without adjusting for the jobs in-sourced from the U.S.). The fears that offshore outsourcing will lead to high-value jobs being replaced by low-value jobs down the road are also argued here to be implausible in view of several qualitative arguments to the contrary. We also demonstrate that offshore outsourcing of Mode 1 services raises no new analytical issues, contrary to what many fear. Thus, it leads to gains from trade (with the standard caveats applicable to conventional trade in goods) and, in specific cases, to income-distribution effects.Outsourcing,WTO, Services

Miracles and Debacles: In Defense of Trade Openness

The paper argues that without trade openness, there is no sustained growth and that trade is rarely responsible for stagnation or decline in incomes over a long period.