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This paper examines how COVID‐19 vaccinations change international trade. We analyze monthly level trade data from January 2020 to March 2022 that cover the bilateral exports from 40 reporting countries to 220 partner countries. Our findings can be summarized as follows. On average, the effects of vaccination rates in importing and exporting countries on exports were found to be insignificant. When considering the income level, we also did not find significant effects of vaccination rates in high‐ and low‐income importing countries on exports. In contrast, the rise of vaccination rates in low‐income exporting countries significantly increased their exports though no significant increase in exports was detected when vaccination rates rose in high‐income exporting countries. These results imply that since low‐income countries are mainly engaged in labor‐intensive industries, the relaxation of lockdown orders (i.e., movement and gathering restrictions) driven by the rise of vaccination rates plays a crucial role in production activities in low‐income countries.

Abstract
The international export and investment activities of firms have been widely studied by scholars. In particular, prior studies have focused on two main hypotheses about firms engaged in international activities such as exporting and investing abroad; namely, self-selection of more productive firms into international activities and learning-by-doing international activities. This paper is the first study that explores these hypotheses in regard to firms' use of free trade agreements (FTAs). We first estimate the propensity score for firms' use of FTA schemes, and find that larger firms are more likely to participate. Then, by conducting matching analysis using the propensity scores, we find that, at least in the short run, the use of FTAs does not change bilateral exports, bilateral imports and employment but does raise the share of local inputs.

Abstract.  This paper examines what contributes to the trade growth of intermediate machinery goods in East Asia in the 1990s. To this end, this paper regresses the input allocation equation to obtain the estimator of border barriers in each country, and then, by using the estimators, the first difference logarithmic form of the gravity equation is regressed. Our empirical results suggest that reduction in border barriers and the production and expenditure growth of intermediate goods are important factors which contribute to the rapid growth of trade in machinery parts in East Asia.

This study empirically examines how trade liberalization changes individuals' wages, with evidence from Thailand. We primarily focus on the effect of Thailand's tariff reduction under the ASEAN free trade regime. We use individual‐level employment data for 2001, 2006, 2011, and 2016. We find that the reduction in AFTA tariffs in Thailand decreases the relative wages of the more educated and skilled workers. Thus, trade liberalization contributes to narrowing income inequality in terms of education and skills. Contrastingly, we do not find heterogeneous effects according to age, sex, marital status, location, or company size. Moreover, the results do not differ significantly between industries with or without international competitiveness.

This study empirically investigates the effects of tariff reductions in a least developed country on its economy. Specifically, we focus on tariff reductions based on the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) in Laos. First, we analyze how the reduction of AFTA tariff rates in Laos affects Laos's imports from AFTA member countries. Our main finding is that the reduction of AFTA tariffs in Laos does not significantly change Laos's imports. Second, we investigate their effects on plant‐level employment. Consistent with the observation of a negligible change in Laos's imports, we find no significant changes in plant‐level employment. In short, although Laos decreased its tariff rates against other AFTA members, imports from them did not significantly increase, and no significant changes occurred in employment. We discuss several possible reasons for these insignificant effects.

This study empirically investigates how much economic and social activities were decreased by the implementation of lockdown policies during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic. We measure the magnitude of those activities using nitrogen dioxide (NO2) emissions. Our observations include daily NO2 emissions in 173 countries from January 1 to July 31, 2020. Our findings can be summarized as follows. Lockdown policies significantly decreased NO2 emissions in low‐income countries during policy and post‐policy periods. In high‐income countries, however, NO2 emissions increased during both periods. In addition, the absolute impact of lockdown policies was larger during the post‐policy period than during the policy period. While the stay‐at‐home policy reduced NO2 emissions, we did not discover robust differences between regions in its effect.

We investigate the impacts of COVID‐19 on global value chains by examining bilateral trade in finished machinery products from January to June in both 2019 and 2020. We use the numbers of COVID‐19 cases and deaths as measures of the impact of the pandemic. Specifically, we investigate how these impacts affect value chains in three scenarios—countries that import finished machinery products, countries that export finished machinery products, and countries that export machinery parts to countries exporting finished machinery products—to assess the impacts on demand, output, and supply chain, respectively. In our analysis, the largest negative impacts were from supply chain effects, followed by output effects. In contrast, we did not find significant impacts from demand effects. We also found that output effects are not so strong in intra‐Asian trade compared with trade in other regions.

We investigate how trade liberalization affects aggregate productivity growth, focusing on market reallocation as well as within‐firm productivity improvement. To this end, using Indonesian plant‐level data from 1993 to 2005, we estimate the plant‐level impact of trade liberalization focusing on productivity, output, and the probability to exit. Then, using the simple dynamic simulation method, we calculate the likely impact if tariff rates remain constant in the initial period. Comparing the actual and counterfactual scenarios, our results show that although within‐plant productivity improvement through tariff reduction has a sizable impact on aggregate productivity growth, the contribution of market share reallocation is less significant.