On export composition and growth

The effect of exports with different technological intensities on economic growth is estimated using a generalization of the model put forward by Feder (1983, "On Exports and Economic Growth", Journal of Development Economics 12, 59-73). The hypothesis that exports in technology-intensive industries have a higher potential for positive externalities coupled with higher productivity levels (due to higher rates of capitalisation) is tested using a comprehensive and detailed data set,covering 45 industrialised and developing countries and including exports of 33 industries over the time period 1981 to 1997. The estimation results, using a random effects model and employing an instrumental variables estimator, support the hypothesis of qualitative differences between high and low tech exports with respect to output growth. The superior performance of high tech exports stems from their positive productivity differential to the domestic sector, while the externality effect is not significant at any meaningful level of significance. The positive productivity differential is only significant for the subsample of developing countries. No significant effects were found to be present in the subsample of OECD member countries.

Trade with central and eastern Europe: Is it really a threat to wages in the west?

This paper analyses the relationship between openness to trade and wages at the industry level (15 manufacturing industries) in 25 EU countries over the period from 1995 to 2005. By applying a cross-country and industry-specific approach, it is possible to control for unobserved heterogeneity at both country and industry levels. We also differentiate between intra and inter-industry trade as well as between trade from western and eastern Europe and we try to assess the relative importance of foreign wages versus domestic productivity developments in an open environment. We find that trade is not an important driver of wages, since the wage response to trade is small. Moreover, in line with the Stolper-Samuelson reasoning, imports from the west generally benefit wages in central and eastern Europe, while imports from the east rather tend to harm wages in the west. The overall wage response is still negative in some sectors, particularly in more resource-based industries. Nevertheless, increased trade reinforces the productivity-wage link and weakens the co-movement of wages particularly in the west, while at the industry level there is little evidence of such a wage-disciplining effect of trade. JEL Classification: F14, F15, F16, J31bilateral trade, European Integration, industry level, openness, wage discipline, Wages

Dimensions of quality upgrading - Evidence for CEEC´s

The impact of trade integration of Central and Eastern European economies in European markets has been studied extensively. Often these studies observe quality upgrading of CEEC exports. In this paper we consider three dimensions of quality upgrading: upgrading across industries, upgrading across different quality segments within industries, and finally, product upgrading within quality segments inside industries. For the analysis we partition industries into distinct quality segments based on EU-15 import unit values. The results for ten CEECs (CEE-5,Baltics and Southeastern Europe) and thirteen industries suggest fundamental differences, both, across country groups and across the three different notions of quality upgrading. The CEE-5 show no evidence of entering a "low-quality trap" in all three dimensions. While there is in general catching-up across industries and inside quality segments, convergence to the EU-level is significantly slower in the high quality segments for the Baltics and Southeast Europe. Thus, the second notion of low-quality specialization may be applicable to these countries.

What drives the market share changes? price versus non-price factors

The paper proposes a theoretical framework for explaining gains and losses in export market shares by considering both price and non-price determinants. Starting from a demand-side model à la Armington (1969), we relax several restrictive assumptions to evaluate the contribution of unobservable changes in taste and quality, taking into account differences in elasticities of substitution across product markets. Using highly disaggregated trade data from UN Comtrade, our empirical analysis for the major world exporters (G7 and BRIC countries) reveals the dominant role of non-price factors in explaining the competitive gains of BRIC countries and concurrent decline in the G7’s share of world exports

"Made in China" - How does it affect our understanding of global market shares?

We propose a comprehensive decomposition of changes in a country’s global market shares that accounts for the value added content of trade. We perform the analysis by combining two datasets – disaggregated trade data from UN Comtrade with internationally integrated Supply and Use Tables from the WIOD. The inclusion of international fragmentation alters the underlying story behind changes in market shares. The ongoing global outsourcing affects market shares directly by shifting production from G7 to BRIC countries. Moreover, accounting for the providers of the value added alters the balance between price and non-price drivers of market shares. Changes in relative quality of countries’ exports are often due to the use of intermediate inputs. For instance, the seemingly improved relative quality of BRIC export goods largely arose from intermediate inputs rather than from improvements in the quality of domestic production. In most cases, the dynamics of the value- added market shares is dominated by price factors

Results of a quality control on non-interventional studies

Non-interventional studies (NIS) have for decades been an established part of post-authorisation medicinal research. As early as the mid-nineties, there were at least rudimentary demands for controllable data quality

Non-Price Competitiveness of Exports from Emerging Countries

We analyse EMEs global competitiveness whereby we explicitly take account of non-price aspects of competitiveness building on the methodology developed in Feenstra (1994) and Broda and Weinstein (2006) and the extension provided in Benkovskis and Wörz (2012). We construct an export price index which adjusts for changes in the set of competitors (variety) and changes in non-price factors (quality in a broad sense) for a set of nine large emerging economies (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and Turkey). We use a highly disaggregated data set at the detailed 6-digit HS level over the period 1999-2010. In contrast to the conclusions based on the CPI-based real effective exchange rate we find that there are rather pronounced differences between individual markets. As a first and important result, China shows a huge gain in international competitiveness due to non-price factors thus suggesting that the role of Renminbi undervaluation for China's competitive position may be overstressed. The strong improvements in Russia's non-price competitiveness are exclusively due to developments in the oil sector as are the competitive losses observed for Argentina and Indonesia. Further, Brazil, Chile, India, and Turkey show discernible improvements in their competitive position when accounting for non-price factors while Mexico's competitiveness has deteriorated regardless of the index chosen