Evaluating the Trade and Welfare Effects of Developing RTAs

Many recent papers have pointed to ambiguous trade effects of developing regional trade agreements, calling for a reassessment of their economic merits. We focus on six such agreements currently in force in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America, estimating their impacts on trade flows and welfare. We combine a gravity model with kernel and bootstrap estimation techniques so as to capture the non-monotonic trade effects while imposing minimal structure. Instead of the usual dummy variables for RTAs, we propose a new variable, capturing the number of years of a country's RTA membership, and we adapt the framework proposed by Winters (1997) to relate trade effects to their welfare implications. The results indicate that only AFTA and MERCOSUR have induced positive trade and welfare effects. The remaining RTAs have produced mixed effects for their members.regional trade agreement; kernel regression; bootstrap; welfare

Persistent Uneven Spread of Economic Activities within Developing RIAs

One of the striking features of many developing Regional Integration Areas (RIAs) is the strong asymmetry between countries. In this paper, we consider a three-country two-sector model in a footloose capital framework. Two of these countries are involved in a regional integration process while the third is left out of the union. They are "port-like" economies where only one region is endowed with international infrastructures, so that imports and exports between trading partners necessarily pass through this transit region. The comparative statics of our model show that better domestic transport infrastructure helps to attract a higher share of footloose activity when trade costs within the RIA are lowered, inducing a persistent uneven spread of the mobile sector between the member countries. If the domestic infrastructure levels of these countries are both raised towards a high-quality level, a convergence process is triggered to the disadvantage of the country left outside the RIA.uneven development; regional integration area; convergence

Evaluating the trade effect of developing regional trade agreements : a semi-parametric approach

Many recent papers have pointed to ambiguous trade effects of developing regional trade agreements (RTAs), calling for a reassessment of their economic merits. The author focuses on seven such agreements currently in force in Sub-Saharan Africa (ECOWAS and SADC), Asia (AFTA and SAPTA) and Latin America (CACM, CAN, and MERCOSUR), estimating their impacts on their members'trade flows. Instead of the usual dummy variables for RTAs, he proposes a variable taking into account the number of years of membership. He then combines a gravity model with kernel estimation techniques to capture the non-monotonic trade effects while imposing minimal structure on the model. The results indicate that except for SAPTA, these RTAs have had a positive impact on their members'intra-trade over the estimation period (1960-99). AFTA seems to be the most successful among them, with an estimated positive impact on its members'imports from the rest of the world (hence no trade diversion), but its impact on their exports to the rest of the world is rather limited. During its first 10 years of existence, ECOWAS appears to have had a positive impact on its members'imports from the rest of the world (hence no trade diversion), but this positive impact vanished over time. SAPTA's negative impact on its members'intra-trade is probably an implicit effect of the India-Pakistan tensions over the estimation period.Free Trade,Trade Law,Trade Policy,Economic Theory&Research,Trade and Regional Integration

ECONOMIC IMPACT ANALYSIS OF THE IVORIAN SARDINELLA FISHERY

A bioeconomic simulation model of the Ivorian sardinella fishery is developed to identify and quantify welfare effects stemming from resource exploitation controlled by a fishermen's monopoly. The biological and economic components are modeled to include multicohorts and multispecies, the demand facing the industrial sector, and a heterogeneous fishing fleet under exploitation conditions with and without cycles. A profit maximization scenario indicates that management of the fishery under the current fleet structure is not socially optimal. The analysis is extended to include the competition from an expanding artisanal sector of the fishery. Any changes in public policies leading to the expansion of the artisanal fishery would result in increases in consumer benefits from the fishery, while the benefits to the syndicate decrease.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Evolving Cityscapes: Agglomeration and Specialization with Mobile Labor and Vertical Linkages

In "new economic geography" models, spatial concentration typically arises either because of worker mobility or because of vertical linkages among firms. We examine a setup that combines those two approaches in conjunction with local congestion costs. We find that, as trade costs are lowered, the spatial concentration of total activity ("agglomeration") follows an inverse u-shaped evolution, while the degree of specialization of locations increases. The evolution of spatial configurations accommodated by this model is consistent with changes in sectorial employment patterns within US metropolitan areas over the 1850-1990 period.agglomeration; specialization; congestion cost; input-output linkages

Validating cultural and contextual traits of a\ud collectivistic community

Sub-Saharan African communities are classified as collectivist\ud societies. But, what exactly is meant by collectivism and to what extent\ud individuals adhere to this given the differences in their socio-economic\ud conditions? This paper is an empirical exploration of the contextual and cultural\ud traits of a rural sub-Saharan African community in order to facilitate their\ud interpretation towards technology design and adoption. Card sorting is used to\ud validate and make explicit contextual and cultural traits previously identified\ud during interviews. It is a confirmation of the collectivist nature of these cultures\ud with more details such as eagerness to confirm personal views and requirements\ud with that of the group in order to save “face”, among other traits

Reflecting on the usability of research on culture in designing interaction

The concept of culture has been attractive to producers of interactive\ud systems who are willing to design useful and relevant solutions to users\ud increasingly located in culturally diverse contexts. Despite a substantial body of\ud research on culture and technology, interaction designers have not always been\ud able to apply these research outputs to effectively define requirements for\ud culturally diverse users. This paper frames this issue as one of understanding of\ud the different paradigms underpinning the cultural models being applied to\ud interface development and research. Drawing on different social science theories,\ud the authors discuss top-down and bottom-up perspectives in the study of users‟\ud cultural differences and discuss the extent to which each provides usable design\ud knowledge. The case is made for combining bottom-up and top-down perspectives\ud into a sociotechnical approach that can produce knowledge useful and usable by\ud interaction designers. This is illustrated with a case study about the design of\ud interactive systems for farmers in rural Kenya

South-South Trade: Geography Matters

Intra-subsaharan African trade appears to be very low, an outcome that is often attributed to the size of the exporting and the importing economies. If that were the explanation, there would be no untapped trade potential. We argue instead that the main determinants of this "missing trade" are geographical and infrastructure-related impediments. Being landlocked and poor translates into high trade costs. In this paper, we try to measure the impact of geographical impediments on South-South trade. We focus on the intra and extra-regional trade of the countries belonging to the West African Economic and Monetary Union. We use an Armington-based model in order to evaluate the impact of geographical and infrastructure-related impediments on bilateral trade flows within this region. We find two main results: paving all inter-state roads would increase trade by a factor of 3, and crossing a transit country reduces intra-bilateral trade flows by 6%, ceteris paribus.South-South trade; landlocked; transport infrastructure; border infrastructure

Self-similar prior and wavelet bases for hidden incompressible turbulent motion

This work is concerned with the ill-posed inverse problem of estimating turbulent flows from the observation of an image sequence. From a Bayesian perspective, a divergence-free isotropic fractional Brownian motion (fBm) is chosen as a prior model for instantaneous turbulent velocity fields. This self-similar prior characterizes accurately second-order statistics of velocity fields in incompressible isotropic turbulence. Nevertheless, the associated maximum a posteriori involves a fractional Laplacian operator which is delicate to implement in practice. To deal with this issue, we propose to decompose the divergent-free fBm on well-chosen wavelet bases. As a first alternative, we propose to design wavelets as whitening filters. We show that these filters are fractional Laplacian wavelets composed with the Leray projector. As a second alternative, we use a divergence-free wavelet basis, which takes implicitly into account the incompressibility constraint arising from physics. Although the latter decomposition involves correlated wavelet coefficients, we are able to handle this dependence in practice. Based on these two wavelet decompositions, we finally provide effective and efficient algorithms to approach the maximum a posteriori. An intensive numerical evaluation proves the relevance of the proposed wavelet-based self-similar priors.Comment: SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences, 201