Trade JMPs (2017-2018)

It’s that time of year again. As I’ve done since 2010, I’ve gathered a list of trade-related job-market papers. New this year is a small collection of spatial economics papers that aren’t about trade per se. If I’ve missed someone, please contribute to the list in the comments.

Spatial Economics

 

I’m hiring research assistants

If you are a student interested in earning an economics PhD, you should consider working as a research assistant before starting graduate school. Working on someone else’s research projects is an opportunity to learn a lot about the research process that is never taught in PhD courses. Learning by doing is a powerful force.

I’m hiring people to start working with me in summer of 2018.  Apply here: http://www.nber.org/jobs/Dingel_Chicago%20Booth.pdf. More generally, you can find a list of such opportunities on the NBER website.

Co-authoring is not about comparative advantage

Comparative advantage is one of our field’s defining insights and “an essential part of every economist’s intellectual toolkit“. The principle is both true and non-obvious, so understanding it separates those who have taken an economics class from those who have not. While economists are rightfully proud of comparative advantage, there is at least one circumstance in which I think economists overuse it.

If you chat with economists about their co-authored research, you’ll often hear them casually attribute the division of labor within their research team to comparative advantage. I’m sure I’ve said this a number of times myself. But co-authoring is not about comparative advantage.

Suppose producing a paper involves two tasks: solving a model and estimating it. If you are better at both tasks than your co-author, then you ought to do both yourself and break up with your co-author. My advice seems contrary to David Ricardo’s famous insight that there are still gains from specialization and trade when one party has absolute advantage in both tasks. But the optimal assignment of tasks does not always depend on comparative advantage.

The Ricardian production function

The principle of comparative advantage is tied to a particular production function. In the Ricardian model, production functions are linear. Thus, individuals’ marginal products are constant. This fact allows us to describe individuals’ choices in terms of relative productivities and relative prices.

In a Ricardian world, the ordering of task assignments depends only on relative productivities: at any relative price, an individual has comparative advantage in the task in which her relative productivity is higher. Absolute productivities show up in a market-clearing condition that determines the relative prices necessary for supply of each task to equal its demand.

Does this sound like co-authorship? Some of the institutional details are wrong. Co-authors don’t usually pay each other for their output. Adding more people may pay off because each of n co-authors can receive more than 1/n credit. But beyond the unusual features of “selling” your output to academia, the Ricardian model’s description of the production process as a research team just doesn’t fit.

Producing research as a team

As Michael Sattinger (1993) explains, not all assignment models are models of comparative advantage:

Some economists may believe that comparative advantage is the only production principle underlying the assignment of workers to jobs, but this is incorrect. As a counterexample, consider an economy in which a job is associated with the use of a particular machine that can be used by only one person at a time…
The reason comparative advantage does not indicate the optimal assignment in this case is that earnings from a job are no longer proportional to physical output at the job. With cooperating factors of production (either explicit in the form of a machine or implicit via a scarcity in the jobs available), an opportunity cost for the cooperating factor must be subtracted from the value of output to yield the earnings.

In the Ricardian model, absolute disadvantage is not a problem, because quantity can make up for quality. If the laborers assigned to a task have low productivity, more labor can be employed in that task to produce more output. But in many situations, quantity cannot substitute for quality. This is most obvious in sports, where rules constrain team size: a hockey team can only have one goaltender. When jobs are scarce, comparative advantage does not determine the optimal assignment.

In a famous applied theory paper, Michael Kremer explored the consequences of producing in a team in which the number of tasks is fixed, each task may be performed by only one person, and a mistake in any one task diminishes the entire project’s value. The latter feature makes this the “O-Ring Theory of Development”, as the space shuttle Challenger blew up due to the failure of only one of its thousands of components.

This production function sounds more like the economics research process. A paper is a discrete unit of output, and it is likely only as persuasive as its weakest link. Poor writing can totally obfuscate good theory. Rarely can a beautiful theory salvage garbage empirics. And it is hard to believe that input quantity can substitute for input quality: “this paper was written by mediocre theorists, but there were so many of them working on it!”

In Kremer’s O-Ring model, the efficient assignment is that workers of similar skill work together in teams. A great theorist pairs with a great empiricist. As a first pass, this seems a reasonable description of the co-authorships we actually observe.

Co-authoring is not about comparative advantage

Of course, production is more complicated than that. How do we explain the valuable contributions of research assistants to projects when their supervisors (would like to claim that they) have absolute advantage across all tasks? One needs a model of hierarchical or sequential production in which research assistants handle easier problems and then pass on unsolved problems to their supervisors. Luis Garicano, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, and co-authors have studied these knowledge-based hieararchies in environments ranging from law firms to exporters.

In short, the optimal assignment depends on the nature of the production function. Despite economists’ frequent invocation of our beloved insight, co-authoring is not about comparative advantage.

Linkages between international trade and urban economics

Keith Head, Thierry Mayer, and Gianmarco Ottaviano have written a review of the latest Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, published in 2015. The prior edition was published back in 2004. Part of their review looks at the interplay between international and urban economics:

The fourth volume of this series was published at the high point for the strand of research known as the New Economic Geography (NEG). It was a period when, united by interest in research by Paul Krugman, trade economists and spatial economists associated closely with each other. We attended the same conferences and worked on similar topics. We debated what was new and what was valuable about the NEG — and whether the two sets overlapped. The Nobel Prize received by Krugman in 2008 validated this line of research but also coincided with the time when it faded significantly from the priorities of urban economists.
Since then, with some prominent exceptions, trade and spatial economists have gone their separate ways.

This passage surprised me, since I see substantial overlap and collaboration between spatial and trade economists at the moment. Since I am a relatively young economist, I did not witness the previous peak or subsequent decline in collaboration.

Head, Mayer, and Ottaviano provide an explanation for the separation:

Spatial economists appear to us to have moved more in the direction of labor, both in terms of using similar worker-level data sets and in terms of greater focus on identification of treatment effects. Trade economists, on the other hand, have in some respects followed industrial organization, in terms of using firm- level data and in terms of tying in closely to theoretical models. Perhaps increased availability of micro data is a unified explanation for divergence as trade economists embraced firm-level customs data sets at the same time as urban economists embraced labor (and housing) data sets.
Though there are still some points of contact, the fifth volume of the handbook largely testifies this divergence since 2004. We would argue, however, that the stage is now set for renewed collaboration. Trade economists are increasingly using data on individual workers and urban economists have embraced structural models. Thus, the current separation between trade and spatial economics is probably mainly attributable to focus on different questions.

Another way to think about the linkages would be to look at co-authorships. For example, consider the Handbook chapter just mentioned: Matt Turner is an urban economist who teaches one of the few PhD courses in urban economics, and Steve Redding is the NBER International Trade and Investment program director.

You can also find individuals who span the spatial-trade divide. The Clark Medal committee describes Dave Donaldson as “an empirical trade economist”. The first two papers they mention are about the effects railroads in India and the United States on intranational trade.

Head, Mayer, and Ottaviano describe the separation in terms of research topics as opposed to toolkits:

Spatial economics has become… essentially intranational with virtually no international trade dimension… the model by Redding and Turner shares many properties with perfectly competitive stochastic trade models of “discrete choice” a la Eaton and Kortum (2002), which are the pillars of the recent wave of new quantitative models that are changing the way trade economists look ex ante at the possible implications of alternative policy scenarios. This shows once more that, whereas the questions of interest may have largely diverged between trade and spatial economics, methods have not.

Head, Mayer, and Ottaviano “are eager to see renewed linkages between international trade and urban economics” and somewhat optimistic about future research at this intersection. I am even more optimistic, since I already see many of the same people at both international economics and urban economics conferences.

Along those lines, Steve Redding and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg have written a survey of “Quantitative Spatial Economics,” which amounts to a new generation of work in spatial economics importing the tools developed in quantitative models of international trade. They’ve also issued a call for papers in Trade and Geography:

The endogenous location of economic agents relative to one another in space influences their consumption, production and investment decisions. It affects their pattern and volume of trade, the markets that they participate in, and the way they organize production processes across locations. As such, geography shapes the impact of local, regional, industry, and aggregate shocks, and the effects of national and local policies.

This Spring 2018 meeting of the NBER International Trade and Investment Program will focus on this set of issues. The meeting will welcome researchers interested in these topics from a variety of perspectives, including, but not limited to, international trade, regional and urban economics, labor, development, and macroeconomics. Both empirical and theoretical papers are welcome.

As someone who works at the intersection of international and urban economics, I may be prone to emphasizing the common features of these fields and the connections between them. But if we’re at the point where trade and urban have suffered a separation, I think the linkages are already renewing. I cannot wait to realize the fruits of greater collaboration.

On the NYT’s “Building Trade Walls”

The Trump administration has certainly increased public discussion of trade policy. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a series of graphics accompanied by a thousand words on “Building Trade Walls” in its online business section. I found the piece frustrating. At a number of points, the article presents valid information in a way that muddles meanings or implies misleading conclusions.

Are sales taxes akin to import tariffs?

Consider these two consecutive paragraphs:

But many countries have additional taxes. For example, China and other countries, but not the United States, also charge a steep value-added tax, which is a kind of national sales tax on imports and home-produced goods alike. Exports are exempt from value-added taxes.

Once value-added taxes and sales taxes are included in an international comparison, America’s taxes on imports are much lower than those of almost every other country.

Why would you make an international comparison that counted VATs or sales taxes as taxes on imports? Since VATs and sales taxes apply to both “imports and home-produced goods alike”, they aren’t protectionist. An import tariff applies to imports and not to domestic-produced goods. The discriminatory nature of the import tariff is why it protects domestic firms from foreign competitors.

Back in September, Paul Krugman lambasted Donald Trump for accusing Mexico’s VAT of being a trade barrier. Now, his NYT colleagues have produced a good-looking map that relies on this premise. A quick mashup of the two makes the contrast clear:

In short, the NYT‘s first paragraph noting the non-discriminatory nature of VATs and sales taxes means that the international comparison offered in the second paragraph is nonsensical.

Is China a developing country?

In another troublesome part of the article, a series of facts about China’s GDP and GDP per capita are somehow combined to say that China might be a developed economy:

Today, China’s designation as a developing country is more debatable. China is the world’s second-largest economy and the biggest producer of steel and cars.

Still, China trails most developed nations by some measures, and Chinese officials argue that it is still developing and does not yet qualify as industrialized.

China’s economy is still roughly two-thirds the size of the American economy, even though China has four times as many people. Average incomes in China are still one-fifth to one-quarter of levels in the United States, and much of China’s interior is still underdeveloped.

Based on the first paragraph, I have to ask: is Iceland a developing economy? It’s quite small, with a GDP of maybe $15 billion. But of course it’s developed, as it has a GDP per capita in the neighborhood of $50,000. Development is about income levels (and accompanying socioeconomic changes), not population size. I have never before seen GDP (as opposed to GDP per capita) used to inform the “developing country” designation.

The NYT article raises the (novel) question of whether China is developed or developing in the context of its trade-policy obligations:

The World Trade Organization, the global trade adjudicator, has allowed developing countries to impose far higher tariffs than industrialized countries, while they build up industries at home. China has been counted as a developing country.

This is unhelpful in a few important respects. First, the WTO does not designate countries as developing or developed. In the narrow areas where developing countries are given special and differential treatment, member nations identify themselves as developing. Second, the “global trade adjudicator” language is potentially confusing. Countries’ MFN tariff schedules are negotiated among member nations at the WTO. There’s no separate WTO entity announcing tariff rates for developing (or developed) countries. Past rounds of negotiations among members have resulted in the tariff schedules of China and other economies. Third, China has lower tariff bindings than a typical developing country, partly because it acceded to the WTO later than most developing countries. Branstetter and Lardy say that “China agreed to a set of conditions that were far more stringent than the terms under which other developing countries had acceded”. Compare China’s 10% average bound tariff to Brazil’s 31% or India’s 49%.  Fourth, there is not much evidence that “far higher tariffs” have allowed countries to “build up industries at home”. China’s export growth, in particular, has involved integration into global value chains and assembly processing, not import-substitution industrialization behind a tariff wall.

A few other concerns

  • It would be more helpful to plot the trade deficit as a percent of GDP than in nominal dollars.
  • A focus on the bilateral deficit with China is unhelpful.
  • A discussion of border adjustments that does not mention exchange rates omits a first-order feature, according to the policy’s proponents.
  • The NYT reporters say: “When China joined the W.T.O. in 2001, the expectation was that its tariffs would later be adjusted lower during global trade talks, known as the Doha Round. But those talks fell apart for a variety of reasons.” China’s bilateral negotiations with the US wrapped up in 1999. The protests in Seattle that year accompanied a failed round of WTO negotiations. I don’t think expectations of the Doha Round – which started two years later in a post-9/11 context – were clear when China’s accession protocol was being determined.

Tracking Trump’s trade policy

The start of the Trump administration means that trade policy is in the headlines far more than it has been for at least a decade. While the trade-policy blogosphere remains pretty quiet (partly because I haven’t updated my blogroll in a few years), there’s a flurry of activity on trade-policy Twitter. You can follow me @TradeDiversion.

Here are some highlights from around the web, most of which I discovered via trade twitter:

  • The Peterson Institute (@PIIE) has been providing fantastic coverage across the board. Gary Hufbauer provided an authoritative brief on the presidential powers that would allow Trump to take protectionist actions without much congressional oversight, and Chad Bown outlined the implications of denying China “market economy” status.  I expect PIIE’s February 1 event on border tax adjustments to be highly informative.
  • The International Economic Law and Policy Blog (@WorldTradeLaw) hasn’t slowed down and remains an essential source of news and analysis.
  • Twitter is the fastest way to see the text of the TPP withdrawal order Trump signed today, learn that Sen. Mike Lee wants to limit Trump’s power to raise tariffs, or ask  the experts what withdrawing from NAFTA without repealing the NAFTA Implementation Act might entail. Shawn Donnan of the FT (@sdonnan) is highly engaged on Twitter. And Brad Setser (@Brad_Setser) recently returned from a long blogging hiatus.
  • One of my MBA students recently pointed me to a story noting that Apple wants to build a US data center in a “foreign-trade zone” exempt from import tariffs. Those foreign-trade zones are the subject of Matthew Grant’s job-market paper. I’m sure Trump will have to something to say about them once he learns they exist.

Home-Market Effects, Weak and Strong

Does size matter? In international trade, market size can influence the pattern of specialization when there are economies of scale. A number of papers written in the late 1990s and early 2000s, surveyed by Keith Head and Thierry Mayer in a 2004 Handbook chapter, looked at the connection between market size and the pattern of specialization and trade, using countries’ total expenditure as the relevant measure of size.

The recent literature linking patterns of trade to countries’ income levels has spurred a number of economists to pay more attention to the role of product quality and non-homothetic preferences in international trade. In particular, relative country size and relative demand are only necessarily synonymous when preferences are homothetic. When expenditure shares vary with income levels, the composition of income influences the composition of demand. Two places with the same number of consumers will have very different demands for high-quality products if one place is populated by high-income households and the other is not. In elegant theoretical settings, Fajgelbaum, Grossman, and Helpman (2011) and Matsuyama (2015) show that economies of scale and trade costs can cause higher-income locations to specialize in the income-elastic products that are in greater relative demand.

Whether a country’s income level influences its product mix and export basket through this demand channel is a classic question in international trade. The hypothesis dates to a monograph by Staffan Burenstam Linder published in 1961. He wrote “the range of exportable products is determined by internal demand. It is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition, that a product be consumed (or invested) in the home country for this product to be a potential export product.” “The level of average income… has… a dominating influence on the structure of demand.” Linder’s economic mechanism – entrepreneurial discovery in bringing products to market – was not presented as a mathematical model, but he made clear empirical predictions about the pattern of trade that could be taken to data: “The more similar the demand structure of two countries, the more intensive, potentially, is the trade between these two countries.”

A formal model in which the pattern of demand influenced the pattern of production did not arrive until 1980, when Paul Krugman introduced a very special model in which there are “home market” effects on the pattern of trade. Consider two countries with identical technologies, homothetic preferences, and different population sizes. Suppose there are two sectors, one producing with increasing returns and trade costs, the other producing with constant returns and costless trade. Krugman (1980) and Krugman and Helpman (1985) showed that “if two countries have the same composition of demand, the larger country will be a net exporter of the products whose production involves economies of scale.”

There are important differences between Linder (1961) and Krugman (1980). En route to formal results, the role of income levels was lost. With homothetic preferences, market size and total expenditure are synonymous. Thus, the empirical work summarized by Head and Mayer used this notion of size. Fajgelbaum, Grossman, and Helpman (2011) bridged this gap between Linder and Krugman by using a demand system in which the composition of income matters for market size. My job-market paper, now available at the Review of Economic Studies, showed that better market access to higher-income consumers results in manufacturing plants specializing in higher-quality products.

There is another gap between Linder (1961) and Krugman (1980). Linder said internal demand was necessary for production and thus exporting. Krugman (1980) predicts that greater demand elicits such a strong production response that the location is a net exporter. Following Linder, I focused on the pattern of specialization and exports in early drafts of my JMP. Some discussants and referees told me that they wanted an empirical result for net exports because “the home-market effect is a prediction about net exports.” I found that proximity to higher-income consumers predicts the composition of exports but not the composition of imports, so my results did characterize net exports. But I remained a bit puzzled by the gap between Linder and Krugman.

A new paper by Costinot, Donaldson, Kyle, and Williams, which Dave presented at last week’s SCID-IGC conference, has now cleared up this confusion about “the home-market effect”. They introduce a “distinction between the weak home-market effect, which focuses on gross exports, and the strong home-market effect, which focuses on net exports.” Economies of scale are necessary for both. “By lowering the price of goods with larger domestic markets, economies of scale can instead create a positive relationship between exports and domestic demand.” “A strong home-market effect arises if economies of scale are strong enough to dominate the direct effect of domestic demand on imports.”

Why has this distinction not been stated previously? It turns out that the formal models in Krugman (1980) and other accounts assume functional forms such that any home-market effect is always strong. The notion of a weak home-market effect, stated very clearly in Linder’s 1961 book, disappeared due to a modeling choice. We can now see it again, in clear mathematical terms, thanks to CDKW.

Simplifying assumptions are a double-edged sword. The role of market access only received its due attention after Krugman’s formalization, for which he won a Nobel Prize. But there were elements in Linder’s account of home-market effects that we are only recovering half a century later. Fajgelbaum, Grossman, and Helpman (2011) revived the role of income composition, and now CDKW have revived the weak home-market effect.

No one appreciates these trade-offs in modeling more than Paul Krugman himself. As he wrote in his 1980 contribution: “The analysis in this section has obviously been suggestive rather than conclusive. It relies heavily on very special assumptions and on the analysis of special cases.” Unfortunately, economists have spent many, many years using only this special case. The weak home-market effect was lost due to assumptions embedded in the very tractable functional forms Krugman employed.

In particular, the weak home-market effect was lost to a modeling quirk that linked economies of scale with the price elasticity of demand. Peter Neary warned about this particular assumption in his great 2001 JEL piece, “Of Hype and Hyperbolas“. Section 4, “Limitations of the Model”, describes “a number of special features that make it less suitable for addressing some issues” and the fact that consumers’ elasticity of substitution and price elasticity of demand winds up as an index of returns to scale is first on his list. With hindsight, we know that the weak home-market effect was one of those issues left unaddressed.

This seems a classic case of a phenomenon Krugman highlighted in his meditation on economic methodology: “an extended period in which improved technique actually led to some loss in knowledge”. Gradually, though, the rigor of formal theory leads to better understanding. Now we have home-market effects, weak and strong.

Trade JMPs (2016-2017)

Another November, another job market. Who’s on the market in trade this year? As I have for the last six years, I focus on trade, neglecting international finance and open-economy macro. The distribution is a bit uneven this year — some schools have zero candidates, while UC Davis has six. If I’ve missed someone, please contribute to the list in the comments.

Measuring rules of origin

In the modern global economy, most barriers to trade do not come in the form of tariffs or quotas. Indeed, as early as 1970, Robert Baldwin described non-tariff protection as a big challenge following the Kennedy Round: “lowering of tariffs has, in effect, been like draining a swamp. The lower water level has revealed all the snags and stumps of non-tariff barriers that still have to be cleared away.” In fact, as Chad Bown notes, draining the swamp may have not just revealed non-tariff barriers, it “may have stimulated growth in levels of old and new forms of nontariff protection”.

This fact about modern protectionism is a bit inconvenient for economists. It’s pretty straightforward to teach the partial-equilibrium economics of tariffs and quotas to students. The supply-and-demand story can be taught with one diagram containing a few rectangles and triangles, like in this video. Moreover, the analysis of an ad valorem tariff is not sensitive to the sector or good being discussed. Given supply and demand elasticities, a tax is a tax, whether it’s applied to apples or autos. Technical barriers to trade like product regulations are necessarily sector-specific. A discussion of the fact that US automobiles must have amber front turn signals while in the EU those lamps are white does not necessarily yield general principles that could be applied to other sectors.

This difficulty also pops up in research. A lot of trade-policy theory treats tariffs as the relevant instruments. For example, Grossman and Helpman’s “Protection for Sale” model describes a government that may impose trade taxes and subsidies. In their empirical assessments of this theory, Goldberg and Maggi and Gawande and Bandyopadhyay used non-tariff barriers as their measures of protection rather than tariff rates, because tariffs are negotiated at the WTO, not determined unilaterally. But non-tariff barriers come in many different forms and therefore raise a host of measurement issues (what is the tariff-equivalent of requiring amber vs white turn-signal lamps?), particularly for making cross-sector comparisons (does comparing the fraction of two sectors’ products covered by any non-tariff measures reveal their relative restrictiveness?). I think we would see a lot more research on non-tariff barriers if they were as easy to measure as tariff rates.

Another prominent feature of modern trade policy is the huge role played by preferential trade agreements. Proposed US trade agreements like the TPP and TTIP mostly concern non-tariff issues like intellectual property rights and regulatory harmonization, not the single-digit ad valorem tariffs that remain for most manufactures. But the preferential tariff rates that define PTAs like NAFTA, customs unions like the EU, and GSP schemes like AGOA rely on a non-tariff barrier called “rules of origin”.

Rules of origin are the criteria used to define where a good was produced. Preferential trade policies necessitate defining goods’ origins so that imports from preferred partners are eligible for lower tariff rates while imports from non-members cannot qualify through mere transshipment. But when goods are produced using intermediate inputs, saying “where” a good was made can get quite difficult. In dictating how to determine the national source of a product, rules of origin can discourage firms from using intermediates imported from sources that aren’t eligible for preferential tariffs. That is, “they prevent final good producers from choosing the most efficient input suppliers around the world, in order to avoid losing ‘origin status’ and the tariff preference it confers.”

We suspect that rules of origin matter. When they’re absent, transshipment occurs. Rotunno, Vezina, and Wang attribute a surge of African textile exports to AGOA’s weak rules of origin, which led Chinese textile manufacturers to exploit AGOA-eligible countries as transshipment corridors to the US. When rules of origin are present, firms find them costly. In a survey of manufacturing firms in developing economies, rules of origin and related paperwork represented the most troublesome type of non-tariff barrier for exporters.

But there has been little research quantifying these rules’ consequences, since measuring rules of origin seems a daunting task. A recent paper by Conconi, Garcia-Santana, Puccio, and Venturini tackles the measurement challenge:

First, the rules contained in the NAFTA agreement are written at a disaggregated level, with specific rules for each product (defined at the heading or sub-heading level of the Harmonized Schedule). Second, they are mostly defined in terms of change of tariff classification, with few instances in which these rules are combined with valued added rules. These features allow us to construct a unique dataset, which maps the input-output linkages embedded in NAFTA RoO. For every final good, we can trace all the inputs that are subject to RoO requirements. Similarly, we can link every intermediate good to the final goods that impose RoO restrictions on its sourcing.

They find that rules of origin matter:

Our results show that NAFTA RoO on final goods led to a significant reduction in Mexican imports of intermediate goods from non-NAFTA countries. As expected, the magnitude of this effect depends on whether the sourcing restrictions were strict or flexible (i.e. whether change in tariff classification rules were combined with alternative value added rules) and on the extent to which Mexican producers had incentives to comply with them (i.e. on the size of the preference margin and the importance of NAFTA export markets).

Here’s a VoxEU column summarizing their research.

Colombia’s port-of-entry restrictions on textile imports

Here’s an unusual non-tariff barrier from a 2006 WTO complaint brought by Panama (mentioned in Eaton, Jinkins, Tybout, Xu):

Second, Panama considers that, through three specific resolutions, Colombia has established a requirement that all goods falling under Chapters 50 to 64 of Colombia’s Customs Tariff (textile and footwear products) that originate in, and/or are imported from, Panama or China shall enter into Colombia only through specified ports of entry. This restriction on the ports of entry applies only to relevant goods coming from Panama or China and not to goods imported directly from third countries or customs territories. Panama claims that the restriction on the ports of entry appears to be inconsistent with Colombia’s obligations under Articles I:1, V:6, XI:1 and XIII:1 of the GATT 1994.

Third, Panama considers that, through a specific resolution, Colombia has established a requirement that commercial invoices of goods coming from the Free Zone of Colon shall include, in addition to the regular requirements, the name of the buyer in Colombia, his address and his Tax Identification Number (“NIT”). This requirement applies only to goods coming from the Free Zone of Colon and not to goods originating in third countries or customs territories. Panama claims that this requirement appears to be inconsistent with Colombia’s obligations under Articles I:1, V:6, XI:1 and XIII:1 of the GATT 1994.

While Panama and Colomiba reached a mutual agreement to solve these issues in December 2006, a closely related July 2007 complaint revisited exports from the Free Zone of Colon, which again faced port-of-entry restrictions:

In relation to restrictions on ports of entry, Panama’s request for consultations is directed at a resolution of June 2007 which provides that all goods classifiable in Chapters 50-64 of the Customs Tariff coming from the Free Zone of Colon in Panama shall be entered and imported exclusively through the jurisdictions of the Special Customs Administration of Bogota and the Barranquilla Customs Office. This requirement does not apply to goods arriving directly from third countries. The regulation provides that with respect to these goods, the authorization of the customs transit procedure will not be appropriate. Furthermore, the import declaration applicable to these imports shall be presented prior to their arrival in the national customs territory but not more than 15 days in advance. If an importer does not comply with these requirements, it is subject to special procedures under Colombia’s Customs Code, including the detention of goods.

Panama considers that these restrictions are inconsistent with Colombia’s obligations pursuant to Articles XI:1, XIII:1, V:2, V:6 and I:1 of the GATT 1994.

Colombia lost this WTO case and conformed to the DSB’s ruling in 2010.