Browsing by Subject "Trade"

Now showing 1 - 12 of 12

The beads of Bosutswe, Botswana
(2010-05) DuBroc, Beau Richard; Denbow, James R. (James Raymond), 1946-; Rodriguez-Alegria, Enrique R.
The hilltop archaeological site, Bosutswe in Botswana had a nearly a thousand years of continuous occupation. Nearly every single strata in both precincts produced shell beads of various materials and origin. By using travelogue sources as well as more recent enthnographical sources, I focus on the possible uses and importance of beads to the people of Bosutswe and the wider southern African region. Using the excavated beads as evidence, I show how certain varieties of beads made their way to the site by way of trade routes with distant riverine areas. Also, I compare my findings with arguments claiming that different groups preferred different sizes beads; therefore, one can determine a site’s ethnic makeup by this measurement alone.
Capitalizing on the Cold War : Hong Kong elites and America’s Pacific empire
(2015-08-11) Hamilton, Peter E.; Hsu, Madeline Yuan-yin; Abzug, Robert H.; Lawrence, Mark A.; Suri, Jeremi; Metzler, Mark; Carroll, John
This study argues that it is impossible to understand either the Cold War Pacific or post-1945 globalization without Hong Kong. Rather than just a small British colony, Hong Kong was at the center of both the Cold War’s transfer of international power from Britain to the United States and the post-1978 reintegration of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with global capitalism. In particular, this study argues that Hong Kong demonstrates a previously unstudied mode of expanding US imperial power that later structured contemporary US-PRC relations and the rapid growth of US-PRC trade. Scholars have documented the United States’ Cold War pursuit of global “hearts and minds” through overt anticommunist cultural diplomacy. This study reframes this research by arguing that the United States steered Hong Kong’s future through the subtlest manner of extending influence: the provision of curated opportunities. Due to British restraints on overt propaganda, the United States oriented this refugee-inundated territory toward US leadership by constraining local business opportunities, sponsoring the expansion of local higher education, and by facilitating enormous numbers of the colony’s youth to attend American colleges and universities. By the early 1970s Hong Kong was routinely the largest sender of foreign students to the United States and by 1990 likely the world’s most US-educated international society. In turn, the 1950 US embargo on the PRC fostered Hong Kong’s dependence on the US market and opened the colony to waves of US capital. The United States transformed into Hong Kong’s largest export market and largest outside investor. This reorientation of educational and business cultures was expansion by the sophisticated imperial technology of coopting capitalist elites, not by the US military. These US opportunities empowered the colony’s capitalists into powerful global agents. It was US-educated returnees who led in brokering outside trade and investment into the PRC through Hong Kong during the 1980s. This same class was critical in stabilizing the colony before its 1997 return to the PRC. Particularly after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, they repurposed America’s Cold War neo-imperialist systems and paved the way for the United States to rebuild economic relations with the PRC during the 1990s
Déficit energético en el Perú y su implicancia en la economía Peruana
(2010-02-06) Chavez Urbina, Grecia
Does trade cause inequality
(2015-05) Zhang, Haoran; Shively, Thomas S.; Gawande, Kishore
The relationship between international trade and income distribution of countries becomes a hot topic in economics research. This paper use random forest method and stepwise regression method to complete variables selection work from a big panel data set with many economic variables. Analysis of an unbalanced panel of country level data reveals that the trade will reduce income inequality in most situations. The coefficients for trade variables are significant in both two types of models, i.e., with and without considering about country effects. But when we split data set into two groups, the coefficients are significant for developed countries but not significant for developing countries.
Environmental implications of the North American Free Trade Agreement
(2019-05-10) Fox, Margaret A.; Flamm, Kenneth, 1951-; Hansen, Patricia Isela
This paper argues that the environmental provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC) have been ineffective at preventing environmental harm because of weak enforcement mechanisms. The agreements sacrificed the potential benefits of linking trade and environmental issues by failing to impose trade penalties for environmental infractions. Chapter One of the paper demonstrates how traditional methods of addressing global environmental issues through multiparty environmental agreements have proven largely ineffective. Chapter Two lays out the potentially harmful effects of free trade agreements like NAFTA on the environment. Chapter Three demonstrates how the environmental provisions of NAFTA as well as the NAAEC fail to impose high enough penalties to deter violations. The conclusion briefly discusses the recently signed United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and its environmental implications
Essays on international trade
(2010-05) French, Scott Thomas; Corbae, Dean; Abrevaya, Jason; Freitas, Kripa; Ramondo, Natalia; Ruhl, Kim
This dissertation consists of three essays pertaining to the causes of the levels and composition of the international trade flows of nations, and the consequential implications for the levels of per capita income and welfare of their populations. The first of these documents a pattern of comparative advantage in product level, bilateral trade data that conventional quantitative trade models have difficulty explaining. It goes on to develop a theory of product level productivity differences based on endogenous differences in the allocation of research and development into product and process innovation across countries over time, and it shows that, when fitted to cross-country manufacturing wage data, the predicted product level technology distribution is consistent with the observed trade pattern. The second essay shows that the distribution of technology levels inferred in the first essay can help explain the inability of both ad-hoc and theoretically based gravity models of trade to account for the observed positive correlation between the percentage of manufacturing output that is traded and countries' per capita income. It derives a modified gravity equation based on a Ricardian model of trade with deterministic product level technology differences across countries. It then uses estimates from a product level gravity estimation to compute the component of this equation that differs from a conventional gravity equation in order to determine the extent to which the observed concentration of comparative advantage in a common set of products for low-income countries explains the small percentage of their output that is exported. The final essay shows that a simple model of firm profit maximization in the presence of sunk costs of entering the export market is broadly consistent with the observed persistence of exporting behavior in firm level data. It uses this simple model and moments from data on US manufacturing firms to estimate the value of the sunk export entry costs faced by these firms using an indirect inference strategy. These costs are shown to be substantial relative the revenue stream of a typical firm.
Essays on international trade and intergenerational human capital transmission
(2010-05) Cengiz, Gulfer; Freitas, Kripa M.; Corbae, Dean; Kuruscu, Burhanettin; Ramondo, Natalia; Alti, Aydogan
First chapter aims to quantify the role of trade in capital goods in cross country income differences. I construct a multi-country general equilibrium model of trade along the line of Eaton and Kortum (2002) and Alvarez and Lucas (2007) and introduce trade in capital goods and capital accumulation. In this framework, comparative advantage and the costs of international trade determine the pattern of production, specialization, and trade. I calibrate the model for 53 countries by estimating trade barriers and calibrating productivity parameters to match the bilateral trade data in 1996. The model is used to analyze full trade liberalizations. I find that removing barriers on investment goods accounts a large portion of reducing cross-country income differences and welfare gain. Counterfactual exercises suggest that developing countries gain relatively more than developed countries. In the second chapter, I focus on the impact of free trade on exportimport ratios in two different sectors. I employ a multi-country general equilibrium model of bilateral trade patterns along the line of Eaton and Kortum (2002) and Alvarez and Lucas (2007). I calibrate the model for 20 countries by estimating trade barriers and calibrating productivity parameters to match the bilateral trade data in 1996. The model is used to analyze full trade liberalizations. The impacts of free trade are predicted to be an increase in the export-import ratios in the comparative advantage sector and a decline in the comparative disadvantage sector, on average. In developing countries the average percentage change in export-import ratios exceeds the average percentage change in export-import ratios in developed countries. Finally, in the third chapter, I focus on the intergenerational human capital transmission. I develop and calibrate a theoretical model that considers three mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of human capital: (i) persistence in learning ability; (ii) parental investment in child’s human capital; (iii) higher teaching productivity of parents with more human capital. Within this framework, I find that (i) and (ii) plays important roles while (iii) does not. In addition the model generates the documented fact that higherwage parents spending more time teaching their children in spite of the higher opportunity cost. I asses the role of nature and nurture effects in intergenerational persistence of earnings and I find that nature accounts a large portion of the intergenerational persistence in earnings. I also quantify the relative importance of these mechanisms on wage inequality.
Mexico: Neoliberal Reform, Climate Change, and Rural Vulnerability
(2010-02-06) Hershaw, Eva
Pier Pressure: How The Russo-Ukrainian War Has Impacted Imports to the Port of Rotterdam
(2023-05) Brasov, Aiden
Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, the EU announced a series of sanctions targeting Russian individuals and industries to halt the progress of the Russian War Machine and ultimately end the conflict. As large trading partners with Russia, the inflow and outflow of goods through the Netherlands and its Port of Rotterdam were heavily impacted. This thesis analyzes the Netherlands' trade data to answer the following questions. With sanctions being the EU's primary diplomatic tool and the war still raging on, are these sanctions currently successful? With the importation of cobalt increasing immediately after the war’s start, did this spike in imports lead to less effective sanctions? With much of this data released months after it is collected, how does the lack of timely, publicly available data influence sanction evaluation? To do this, the first task is to explore different sanction evaluation methods and select the best to measure the EU's sanction efficacy. The second task is to address the rise in the importation of cobalt and how this might delay Europe's economic disentanglement from Russia. The third task is to discuss the current lack of available trade data in the EU and the benefits to future sanction evaluation by publicizing Bill of Ladings data.
Regional dynamics and local dialectics in Iron Age Botswana : case studies from the hinterland in the Bosutswe Region
(2013-08) Klehm, Carla Elizabeth; Denbow, James R. (James Raymond), 1946-
Since the 1980's, few have included sub-Saharan African in worldwide comparative discussion of complex societies. This exclusion is at the expense of challenging embedded notions of the development of complexity. The trading polity Bosutswe (700-1700 AD) at the eastern edge of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana and its surrounding region provide a perfect example of why this is important. In the Bosutswe region, complexity was not be driven by external factors, elites, or the core, but arose from local actors and out of localized contexts. During its occupation, Bosutswe became increasingly involved with long-distance trade in the Indian Ocean exchange network, linking trade from the African coast to the interior. At Bosutswe, glass beads associated with long-distance trade and local ostrich eggshell beads attest to a strong local economy supported by cattle herding, subsistence farming, and iron and bronze manufacture. This trade with Bosutswe peaked from 1200-1450 AD, when social stratification at Bosutswe became spatially and materially evident. This dissertation focuses on Bosutswe's trajectory through the point of view of two nearby settlements, Khubu la Dintša (1220-1420 AD) and Mmadipudi Hill (~550-1200 AD), to reconstruct the local economy and landscape. Expanding the concept of the polity to one situated in a landscape of human and environmental interchange provides a key comparative insight to other studies of complex societies and variable trajectories of societal development. The Bosutswe landscape and by extension Iron Age southern Africa can be conceptualized as a patchwork of landmark hilltop polity centers on a scrub desert landscape of agropastoral activity surrounded by smaller hilltop and ground sites. The local dynamic may have involved strategies by Bosutswe to mitigate environmental characteristics of low rainfall, opportunistic hunting and herding opportunities for the surrounding communities, and alliances between these communities for security in a politically unstable era. Everyday life would have involved issues about land use, as over time herders and farmers exhausted pastures, soil fertility, and firewood. Treating these early polities as landscapes of human, animal, and environmental relationships will help revise the way early complex societies are conceptualized: not as individual sites, but as local landscapes of power.
The Anthropogenic Variable in Hydro-meteorological Risk in the Dominican Republic
(2010-02-06) Bosquez, Mónica
Trade growth, the extensive margin, and vertical specialization
(2010-08) Mostashari, Shalah; Debaere, Peter, 1965-; Corbae, Dean; Abrevaya, Jason; Freitas, Kripa M.; Magee, Stephen P.; Kendrick, David A.
This dissertation consists of three essays in International Trade. The first essay studies the impact of changing tariffs on the range of goods countries export to the United States. The empirical analysis shows that tariffs tend to have a statistically significant but small impact: at best 5 percent of the increasing extensive margin for 1989-1999 and 12 percent for 1996-2006 is explained by tariff reductions. This suggests the extensive margin has not amplified the impact of tariffs on trade flows to such an extent that the relatively moderate tariff reductions since WW II can explain the strong growth of world trade. The second essay investigates the sector and country determinants of the range of goods that countries export to the United States. Besides relating the traditional determinants of comparative advantage, sectors’ factor intensities interacted with countries’ factor abundance to the extensive margin in a sector, the empirical investigation includes interactions between sector-level measures of intermediate intensity and trade frictions. Consistent with hypotheses about fragmentation, the results show that closer countries and countries with lower tariffs imposed on them export a wider range of goods in sectors that have large intermediate cost shares. The impact of trade frictions is, however, far less pronounced for the more skilled-labor intensive sectors that are characterized by use of a greater range of intermediates. The third essay studies the impact of trade liberalizations on U.S. bilateral trade from 1989-2001 with a focus on the influence of exporting country liberalizations which matter when exports are produced with imported intermediates. Guided by extensions of the Eaton and Kortum (2002) model which allows for production to involve the use of imported intermediates, the essay estimates a structural equation that links U.S. bilateral trade flows to both intermediate tariffs imposed by countries exporting to the United States and U.S. tariffs. The empirical estimates suggest that especially for less developed countries their own liberalizations have been quantitatively much more important in explaining bilateral trade growth with an effect 3 times larger than the impact of U.S. liberalizations.