Trade Data Falsification and Informal Capita Movement: A Study of Bangladesh with Major Asian Trade Partners

Abstract

The imposition of restrictive trade policies and consequent fabrication of foreign trade statistics acts as hindrance for effective policy formulations in the developing countries. This article presents the trade misreporting scenario of Bangladesh in relation to major Asian trade partner countries (China, India and Singapore) between 1973 and 2018 and examines the possibilities of informal capital movements across borders. Using the vector autoregression (VAR) and autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) models, we first build partner-level exercise, followed by a combined panel, and find that spot and forward exchange rates, custom duties and real interest rate differences between foreign and home largely affect trade misreporting rates. Interestingly, we also find that the values of past import under-invoicing might also lead to export under-invoicing and vice versa, a two-way causal relationship. JEL Codes: F14, F68, C10, C52