Suchergebnisse

The proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the European Union and the United States of America would be the largest preferential trade agreement in the world. Encompassing almost half of world GDP, it will have strong economic effects on Germany. In this paper, we put this trade policy initiative in its broader perspective. We argue that, despite appearances, the US-German trade potential is not exhausted. We survey existing studies and find that the project could increase per capita income in Germany by between 1 and 3%. We critically question the need for investor-state dispute settlement and argue that the TTIP will have discriminatory effects on at least some third countries. However, regulatory councils are important ingredients of the deal as they guarantee that the TTIP will indeed influence the setting of global standards in the future.

Growth theory predicts that natural disasters should, on impact, lower GDP per capita. However, the empirical literature does not offer conclusive evidence. Most existing studies use disaster data drawn from damage records of insurance companies. We argue that this may lead to estimation bias as damage data and the selection into the database may correlate with GDP. We build a comprehensive database of disaster events and their intensities from primary geophysical and meteorological information. In contrast to insurance data, our GeoMet data reveal a substantial negative and robust average impact effect of disasters on growth. The worst 5% disaster years come with a growth damage of at least 0.45 percentage points. That average effect is driven mainly by very large earthquakes and some meteorological disasters. Poor countries are more strongly affected by geophysical disasters; rich more by meteorological events. International openness and democratic institutions reduce the adverse effect of disasters.

Does trade openness cause higher GDP per capita? Since the seminal instrumental variables (IV) estimates of Frankel and Romer [F&R](1999) important doubts have surfaced. Is the correlation spurious and driven by omitted geographical and institutional variables? In this paper, we generalize F&R's geography-based empirical strategy to a panel setting. We observe that natural disasters affect bilateral trade, and that this effect is conditioned by geographical variables such as distance to financial centers or area. This allows us to use interactions between geography and the incidence of disasters at the bilateral level to construct an instrument for multilateral openness that varies across countries and time. The instrument can be used in panel setups where it is possible to fully control for geographical and historical determinants of countries' performances as well as for the direct effect of disasters. We find that the elasticity of income with respect to openness is about 0.69, but that substantial heterogeneity exists across country samples.

Recent literature finds that exporters are particularly vulnerable to financial market frictions.As a consequence, exports may be lower than their efficient levels. For this reason,many countries support exporters by underwriting export credit guarantees. The empiricalevidence on the effects of those policies is, however, very limited. In this paper, we usesectoral data on export credit guarantees issued by the German government. We investigatewhether those guarantees indeed do increase exports, and whether they remedy the exportrestrictingeffect of credit market imperfections both on the sectoral and on the exportmarket levels. Exploiting the sectoral structure of a rich three-ways panel data set ofGerman exports, we control for unobserved heterogeneity on the country-year, sectoryear,and country-sector dimensions. We document a robust export-increasing effect ofguarantees. There is some evidence that the effect is larger for export markets with poorfinancial institutions and in sectors that rely more on external finance.