The Effect of Tariffs on Spanish Goods Exports

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of trade protectionism in the form of tariff barriers on Spanish goods exports. The Spanish economy has significantly increased its degree of openness, which improves potential economic growth, but also implies a higher exposure to the protectionist shift in the international environment observed in the last years. With the purpose of assessing exports sensitivity to tariff increases, we obtain a database combining annual tariffs applied to Spanish products over the years 1995-2019 from WITS and bilateral extra-EU Spanish goods exports from Eurostat, with a product disaggregation level at 6 digits. We estimate the effect of tariffs both on exporting probability (i.e. exports extensive margin) through a linear probability model and exports levels (i.e. exports intensive margin) through a gravity equation. The findings of this paper show that higher tariffs reduce exports levels through extensive an intensive margins. A 1% tariff increase reduces on average the probability of exporting to a specific market by nearly 0.08 pp. and exported values by around 1%.