Browsing by Subject "International trade"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Essays on globalization.
    (2012-07) Kondo, Illenin O.
    This dissertation consists of two essays. The first essay analyzes the labor market effects of import competition in the U.S. Recent empirical research indicates, in contrast to standard trade theory, that trade and foreign competition negatively impact some locations by worsening labor market outcomes such as unemployment. I extend and confirm this work using unique data on the U.S. Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) programs since 1983. I find that locations that face more foreign competition have higher job destruction rates, lower job creation rates, and thereby higher unemployment rates. I introduce a simple trade model with unemployment and segmented local labor markets facing different degrees of foreign competition. Import competition has a correlated effect on job destruction and job creation because the most vulnerable locations to foreign competition have lower productivity. Despite large reductions in employment rate in the worse hit local labor markets and in contrast to an exogenous increase in foreign productivity, an unexpected trade liberalization yields aggregate welfare gains in the model calibrated to the U.S. The second essay studies the accumulation of foreign reserves in emerging economies. Emerging economies, unlike advanced economies, have accumulated large foreign reserve holdings. We argue that this policy is an optimal response to an increase in foreign debt rollover risk. In our model, reserves play a crucial role in reducing debt rollover crises ("sudden stops''), akin to the role of bank reserves in preventing bank runs. An unexpected increase in rollover risk leads to a global rise in sudden stops, prompting emerging economies to update their priors about the risk they face. We show that a global increase in the rollover risk faced by emerging economies explains the outburst of sudden stops in the late 1990s, the subsequent increase in foreign reserves holdings, and the salient resilience of these countries to sudden stops ever since.
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    Global displacements : geographies of work and industrial restructuring in the Dominican Republic.
    (2010-02) Traub-Werner, Marion
    Many accounts of the globalization of production in the late 20th and early 21st centuries focus on the boom of new foreign direct investment in so-called global factories in the global South. Global Displacements shifts the focus of academic inquiry to an equally pervasive moment of transnational capitalist production: the collapse of labourintensive employment strategies and the restructuring of spatial and social divisions of labour in their wake. Drawing on ethnographic methods and historical accounts of economic change in the Dominican Republic’s northern Cibao region, I consider the restructuring of the country’s export apparel industry, the most long-standing and successful in the circum-Caribbean. Over the past decade, facing increased competition for US market share and a new regime of trade regulation without global quotas, garment firms in the Dominican Republic undertook a process of restructuring, including the retrenchment of the majority of the country’s garment workforce. I explore this process from the perspective of four sociospatial locations: Dominican firms integrated into transnational production assemblages, the embodied labour geographies of former garment workers, the layered histories of accumulation and disinvestment of the Cibao region and its border with Haiti, and my own position as a researcher. Bringing the insights of deconstruction and Marxist and feminist theory to bare on a critical ethnography of industrial restructuring, I examine geographies of production as constituted by displacements: that is, the complex mechanism of inclusion in and exclusion from circuits of capital accumulation that reproduce subjects and places with difference. My study of displacements in the Dominican Republic illustrates how accumulation proceeds through the reproduction of hierarchies of labour, premised upon reworking the violent abstractions of race, gender and nation along existing and new spatial contours of profit-making and disinvestment. Geographies of work and industrial restructuring in the Dominican Republic reveal problematic assumptions that lie behind much contemporary analysis of industrial change. Many accounts frame global industrial restructuring since the 1970s as a process of outward capitalist expansion, incorporating new places and new subjects into transnational labour processes. Such a framing reduces complex, nonlinear experiences of industrial transformation to a teleological sequence, where industrialization serves a marker of “development,” signifying a measure of one’s closeness or distance from Eurocentric modernity. By decentering teleological assumptions of industrialization, the geography of displacements presented in the following pages demonstrates industrial restructuring to be an on-going reworking of industrial and deindustrial processes irreducible to fixed and sequential categories of the postindustrial, newly industrializing, or so-called developing worlds.
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    International trade in genetically modified-sensitive industries: a cross-country analysis.
    (2011-01) Da'ar, Omar Bundid
    This dissertation analyzes the effects of non-traditional endowments (R&D stock and biotech land) on trade of genetically-modified sensitive industries. The study also explores the effects of differences in institutional endowments (intellectual property rights and regulatory regimes) on genetically modified sensitive industries. In particular, I ask, do the non-traditional endowments confer comparative advantage to a country in exporting to the rest of the world (ROW)? I pursue this hypothesis by looking at whether a country's true non-traditional endowments (R&D and biotech land) correspond with net export of embodied non-traditional endowments. I employ the factor-content model of the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (HOV) as the underlying theoretical framework. The empirical implementation and method include examination of this relationship via non-parametric and parametric methods using 2006 cross-section data of three-digit level of the Standard International Trade Classification (SITC). Further, I examine the causal relationship between non-traditional endowments and countries' bilateral trade of genetically modified-based industries. In addition, I analyze the effect of institutional measures of policy on bilateral trade in GMO-based industries and account for ways in which these institutional factors interact with non-traditional endowments (R&D and biotech land). I employ the Gravity model of international trade to examine these relationships. Findings show countries with higher non-traditional endowments than the world average have embodied net exports of these endowments. In other words, this finding is an indication that such countries have revealed comparative advantage in goods that make intensive use of these factors. In particular, results show that the causal relationship between trade in genetically modified-sensitive products and biotech land of a country is informative. In aggregate and subaggregates trade, the biotech land factor consistently shows positive and statistically significant parameter estimates indicating that indeed it confers comparative advantage. Accordingly, the relationship between trade in GMO-based industries and GMO land is genuinely causal rather than just correlation. This implies that the variation of trade in GMO-based industries is not attributable to either unmeasured characteristics or the traditional endowments. However, the relationship between trade in genetically modified-sensitive industries and R&D stock is less definitive. R&D stock confers comparative advantage in one (fats or vegetable related) of the four main subaggregates while it neither confers comparative advantage nor comparative disadvantage in others. There is evidence that R&D stock (knowledge capital) does not fit the traditional immobility assumption. Knowledge capital spillovers may take place. Thus, the importance of knowledge capital is not showing up in the statistical results. I found mixed evidence on the effect of institutional endowments (relevant regulatory regimes and intellectual property rights) on bilateral trade in GMO-based industries. Using different levels of data aggregations (for comparability and concordance) and estimation methods (for robustness checks), the results showed that strengthening of patent protection in the destination country relative to the source country reduces exports of genetically modified-sensitive products. This demonstrates a market power effect where strengthening intellectual property protection grants monopoly power to economic agents of importing country relative to exporting country. Finally, results show that even when there are marked regulatory differences and policies, there is little evidence of diversion of trade in GMO-sensitive industries. The dissertation is organized as follows. Chapter 1 provides an introduction and overview of GMO-intensive industries. This chapter also summarizes patterns of international data on trade in GMO-intensive industries, R&D, GMO land use, and policies including regulatory regimes and intellectual property rights. Chapter 2 then analyzes determinants of trade in GMO-intensive industries using the Heckscher-Ohlin model. This analysis focuses on determinants of a country's trade with the rest of the world. Chapter 3 analyzes determinants of trade in GMO-intensive industries using the Gravity model. This analysis focuses on the determinants of a country's bilateral trade with each trading partner. Chapter 2 and 3 both focus on the role of the non-traditional endowments as determinants of trade. These non-traditional endowments include: (1) the knowledge stock of countries, (2) the land endowments of countries including the GMO component of land, (3) regulatory regimes of countries related to GMO policies, and (4) the intellectual property right policies of countries. I refer to the knowledge stock variable as an R&D stock through much of the dissertation. I also refer to the two policy variables as `institutional endowments' throughout the dissertation. Chapter 4 then provides a conclusion, discussion of policy implications of the research, elucidates the limitations, and proposes areas of further research.