Ben Muse has a series of posts on international trade in healthcare:
Mary Amiti and David Weinstein:
A striking feature of many financial crises is the collapse of exports relative to output. In the 2008 financial crisis, real world exports plunged 17 percent while GDP fell 5 percent. This paper examines whether the drying up of trade finance can help explain the large drops in exports relative to output. This paper is the first to establish a causal link between the health of banks providing trade finance and growth in a firm’s exports relative to its domestic sales. We overcome measurement and endogeneity issues by using a unique data set, covering the Japanese financial crises of the 1990s, which enables us to match exporters with the main bank that provides them with trade finance. Our point estimates are economically and statistically significant, suggesting that trade finance accounts for about one-third of the decline in Japanese exports in the financial crises of the 1990s.
The negative effect of distance on bilateral trade is one of the most robust findings in international trade. However, the underlying causes of this negative relationship are less well understood. This paper exploits a temporary shock to distance, the closing of the Suez canal in 1967 and its reopening in 1975, to examine the effect of distance on trade and the effect of trade on income. Time series variation in sea distance allows for the inclusion of pair effects which account for static differences in tastes and culture between countries. The distance effects estimated in this paper are therefore more clearly about transportation costs in the trade of goods than typical gravity model estimates. Distance is found to have a significant impact on trade with an elasticity that is about half as large as estimates from typical cross sectional estimates. Since the shock to trade is exogenous for most countries, predicted trade volume from the shock can be used to identify the effect of trade on income. Trade is found to have a significant impact on income. The time series dimension allows for country fixed effects which control for all long run income differences. Because identification is through changes in sea distance, the effect is coming entirely through trade in goods and not through alternative channels such as technology transfer, tourism, or foreign direct investment.
A list of papers using firm-level trade data provided by the BEA.
Ahead of the WTO’s trade ministerial in Geneva, VoxEU has put together a book (pdf) of 23 essays by trade economists explaining the collapse of global trade during the recent crisis. Among the authors are Fred Bergsten, Anne Krueger, Richard Baldwin, Peter Schott, and many others.
Ben Muse says the United States needs to employ more foreign nurses, contrary to the claims of Barack Obama.
Using the large variation in the inflow of immigrants across US states we analyze the impact of immigration on state employment, average hours worked, physical capital accumulation and, most importantly, total factor productivity and its skill bias. We use the location of a state relative to the Mexican border and to the main ports of entry, as well as the existence of communities of immigrants before 1960, as instruments. We find no evidence that immigrants crowded-out employment and hours worked by natives. At the same time we find robust evidence that they increased total factor productivity, on the one hand, while they decreased capital intensity and the skill-bias of production technologies, on the other. These results are robust to controlling for several other determinants of productivity that may vary with geography such as R&D spending, computer adoption, international competition in the form of exports and sector composition. Our results suggest that immigrants promoted efficient task specialization, thus increasing TFP and, at the same time, promoted the adoption of unskilled-biased technology as the theory of directed technologial change would predict. Combining these effects, an increase in employment in a US state of 1% due to immigrants produced an increase in income per worker of 0.5% in that state
How does competition affect innovation? We address this question by using a novel approach to measure quality — an important component of innovation — using highly disaggregated product data for a large set of countries. Constructing an internationally comparable measure of quality enables us to separate the effect of reducing import tariffs, our measure of competition, on quality upgrading from other country level differences in competitive environments, and product demand shocks. We base our analysis on recent theoretical frameworks that predict that the effect of competition on innovation depends on firms’ proximity to the world technological frontier. As predicted by theory, we find that lower tariffs are associated with quality upgrading for products close to the world frontier; whereas lower tariffs discourage quality upgrading for varieties distant from the frontier.
Antoine Berthou and Charlotte Emlinger at Vox:
The volume of world trade has plummeted with the global crisis. This column says that high-quality imports are more responsive to income changes than low-quality imports. This explains why world trade value fell faster during the crisis than world trade volume, which fell faster than GDP.
WSJ:
Global trade flows slipped in August after rising for the two previous months, an indication that the economic recovery is more fragile and anemic than previous data have hinted.The Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis said trade volumes fell 2% from July, according to an algorithm based on customs data from 23 developed countries and 60 emerging markets, accounting for 95% of global trade.
Trade Diversion 