Suchergebnisse

Do trade integration and fiscal competition contribute to shape the economic landscape? The answer is yes. This paper uses a theoretical model and an econometric analysis of Brazilian regional manufacturing employment data over the period 1990-1998 to address this question. Brazil is a natural case study because this country liberalized trade during the 1990s and their sub-national governments engaged in a fiscal dispute. Econometric results show that trade liberalization has had an impact on spatial developments and this effect is increasing over time. Moreover, subsidies also exert an influence, but their relative importance is falling.

Abstract
How can policymakers promote women-led exporting firms? In this paper, we study the role of online business platforms to reduce informational barriers to exporting for women entrepreneurs. We hypothesize that, if the costs associated with accessing digital platforms are more symmetric across gender than traditional trade costs, digital trade platforms can play an important role in making trade more gender equal. To assess this hypothesis, we combine information on firms' participation in ConnectAmericas, a free and purely informational online platform, and detailed firm-level export data of a developing country over a long period. We find that participation in this platform is associated with a significantly larger increase in exports for women-managed firms than for men-managed firms in otherwise identical products and destinations. Given existing evidence on the role of women-managed businesses in reducing gender earnings inequality, these results suggest that policies which encourage women participation in online environments, to reduce the informational barriers associated with operating in foreign markets, have the capacity to promote gender equality more broadly.

This paper examines whether economic integration favors countries' convergence into a common cone of diversification. We analyze the manufacturing specialization patterns for a sample of 19 current and potential European Union countries over the period 1963-1998, and assess the impact of integration on their evolution. We perform year-by-year threshold estimations of Rybczynski relationships to identify the diversification cones and then estimate discrete choice models to investigate whether membership in the European Union is associated with a higher probability of being in a same cone. Economic integration in Europe is found to have promoted convergence from lower to higher diversification cones.

Virtually all Latin American and Caribbean countries have established specialized organizations to promote their exports. Existing analyses of these organizations are at best partial and fragmentary. This paper aims at overcoming these limitations of the literature by presenting a consistent, detailed organizational characterization of the major export promotion entities in their respective countries. This characterization is primarily based on data collected through an extensive survey that we have conducted among organizations in the region, and, to put them into an appropriate perspective, among relevant organizations from countries outside of the region. Moreover, for a few countries, we have carried out in-depth case studies not only to report more precise information on those aspects covered by the survey, such as the number and diversity of other actors, both public and private, engaged in export promotion along with their interaction patterns, but also to examine additional factors that are likely to be helpful in understanding the current organizational configuration of the aforementioned entities and their potential effectiveness, such as the historical institutional process leading to their creation.