Suchergebnisse

This paper reviews the content of as well as the reception of the current state of the planned China-European union Comprehensive Agreement on Investment as per January 2021. Moreover, it forms some expectations regarding its economic effects. Key conclusions are that, in spite of a limited scope of new concessions beyond ones that are realized or planned anyway unilaterally, the agreement will likely boost not only investment but also trade, and it will likely establish a closer political cooperation between China and the European Union. One reason for the positive economic effects is the reduction in uncertainty about the mutually granted concessions for investment. However, further stimulating effects of the very agreement will be possible when accompanying it with concessions on trade in goods and services in the future. ; ISSN:1753-8963 ; ISSN:1753-8971

The dominant paradigm of the estimation of causal partial effects of preferential economic integration agreements (PEIAs) on trade costs and trade flows is to rely on a selection on observables, with propensity‐score matching being the leading example. Conditional on some score of joint determinants of PEIAs and trade flows, causal partial effects of PEIAs on trade are obtained from a simple conditional mean comparison of trade between members and non‐members. Key for this approach to obtain consistent estimates is that the score used to form comparison groups is balanced: similarity of country pairs in the PEIA propensity core means similarity in all the observables. Otherwise, the effects may be biased, misascribing effects of differences in individual observables to PEIA membership. We employ a remedy for this bias through entropy balancing, demonstrate that there is an upward bias of PEIA effects on trade flows from lack of covariate balancing, and quantify the bias of the effects.

SUMMARY
At the beginning of 2018, President Trump started taking protective tariff measures against products from China in a sequence of events which started a 'trade war' between the United States and China. As the value of trade flows affected on both sides rose to a significant amount, this episode will become an interesting research object in the future. A thorough analysis of many outcomes of interest is at this point in time – and even will be in the next few years – impossible due to a lack of data which will only become available at a later point. However, as is customary with historical preferential liberalizations in trade agreements and potentially the opposite of it through Brexit, it is possible to gauge consequences of this 'trade war' or 'trade dispute' when focusing on the stocks of listed companies around related tariff-change announcements or implementations by the United States and China in the relevant time span. This paper proposes such an analysis and finds, very much consistent with the rumours from business, that the associated protectionist tariffs appear to have done to a large extent the opposite of what was intended: they hurt domestic firms in targeted and also other, untargeted sectors of an acting country, and they affect third countries and territories which are not even party to the 'trade war' or 'dispute'.

AbstractAccess to external funds is crucial for the entry and expansion of entrepreneurial firms and the sectors they predominantly arise in. This paper reports three important results. First, comparative advantage is shaped by factor endowments as well as fundamental determinants of corporate finance. In particular, a larger equity ratio of firms and tough governance standards relax financing constraints, lead to entry of firms at the lower bound of the productivity distribution and create an endogenous comparative advantage in sectors where entrepreneurial firms are clustered. Second, a small degree of protection in the constrained sector can raise a country's welfare by relaxing financing constraints if terms‐of‐trade effects are small. Third, a small degree of protection of the financially dependent industry in a financially underdeveloped country might even raise world welfare.

This paper provides a first assessment of Switzerland's international input-output linkages. In doing so, the paper focuses on Switzerland's trade with the European Union, which rep- resents the country's most important trading partner. In 2015, more than 50% of Swiss exports were directed to the EU while more than 70% of Swiss imports were sourced from EU countries. Using data on Switzerland's transaction-level imports and data on the sector association of a subset of Swiss firms, we are able to characterize the detailed nature of these imports regarding the sectors they are directed to and the countries they originate from.