Role Of Trade Openness Research Articles

Estimation of Government Spending Multiplier in EU Economies

Abstract The aim of this paper is to estimate government consumption multiplier and to examine the effect of various characteristics of countries on the size of fiscal multiplier. We apply a panel VAR model following Ilzetzki et al. (2013) for a sample of 28 EU countries covering the period from 1995 to 2017. Key findings are, first, the estimated average fiscal multiplier is larger than unity. Second, the size of fiscal multiplier is larger in the cases of lower public indebtedness, for more developed European countries and for more financially open economies, which is also in line with relevant empirical literature. Regarding the role of trade openness, the results are inconclusive. In addition to this, membership of countries in the European integrations positively affects the size of fiscal multiplier. Therefore, fiscal policymakers should use fiscal stimuli as the instrument of boosting short-term economic growth selectively and consider country-specific characteristics. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion in two ways, it examines the effect of additional characteristics of countries on the size of fiscal multiplier and updates existing empirical literature.

Pricing behavior and the role of trade openness in the transmission of monetary shocks

The empirical evidence on the role of trade openness in the monetary transmission is not conclusive: some studies find that it increases the sensitivity of output to monetary shocks, others find that it does not. Using a New Keynesian open economy model, I show that the role of trade openness in the transmission of monetary shocks can be reversed completely by the degree of exchange-rate pass-through into import prices. If the pass-through is complete, traded output increases more than nontraded output after a positive monetary shock, if the pass-through is zero, traded output increases less. Moreover, ignoring sectoral heterogeneity in price rigidity leads to an incorrect assessment of the role of trade openness in the transmission of monetary shocks.

BREXIT and Foreign Direct Investment: Key Issues and New Empirical Findings

This contribution takes a new look at the gravity equation model in relation to foreign direct investment (FDI) of leading industrialized countries which presents a useful basis for assessing certain potential impacts arising from BREXIT—the envisaged leaving of the EU by the United Kingdom. The gravity equation estimated subsequently allows one to consider the case of BREXIT and the broader role of EU membership and other variables. Looking at the period from 1985 to 2012 for a dataset which contains 34 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, Pseudo Poisson Maximum Likelihood (PPML) dyadic fixed estimations take into account a broad set of approaches and variables. Besides the traditional variables of the EU/EU single-market membership of the source country and of the host country, we further consider the role of trade openness as well as corporate tax rates and the ratio of inward FDI stock to total capital stock. The analysis shows that trade openness is a variable which can be largely replaced by the inward FDI stock/capital stock ratio so that gravity FDI modeling with a strong emphasis on trade openness is likely to overstate the role of trade and to understate the role of relative FDI accumulation effects. The implication for BREXIT analysis is that the UK will face three impulses for FDI inflows: (1) leaving the EU single market will strongly reduce FDI inflows; (2) if foreign ownership in UK capital stock should strongly increase in the run-up to the BREXIT year 2019, part of the dampening effects of leaving the EU will be mitigated by the increase of the FDI stock/capital stock ratio, which in turn is likely to reflect a Froot–Stein effect related to real pound depreciation for 2016–2018; (3) to the extent that the UK government will want to reinforce output growth through higher FDI inflows, a reduction of corporate taxation could generate high effects but could also stimulate a downward international corporate tax reduction game.

The Transnational Tilt of the Treadmill and the Role of Trade Openness on Carbon Emissions: A Comparative International Study, 1965–2010

There are various schools of thought regarding the relationship between the environment and economy. Ecological modernization argues that the harmful effects of economic growth and development on the environment decline through time, whereas the treadmill of production and ecologically unequal exchange postulate different perspectives. This study relies on World Bank and World Resources Institute data for the period of 1965–2010. Time‐series cross‐sectional Prais‐Winsten (PW) regression models with panel‐corrected standard errors (PCSE) are employed to examine whether economic growth and trade openness intensified or decoupled in relation to three measures of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions during this period. The findings of this study indicate that there has been a “tilt” in the treadmill of production—that is, the most environmentally degrading production processes have moved to less developed countries. Furthermore, integration into the world economy has been associated with an intensification in CO2 emissions for less developed countries. Surprisingly, however, this phenomenon does not seem to be driven by exports sent to high‐income nations, suggesting that there are mechanisms embodied within the global organization of production that require further exploration.

External debt and current account adjustments: The role of trade openness

In this paper, we examine the various links among external debt, trade openness and current account in Sub-Saharan Africa, utilizing an approach that highlights current account from the perspective...

The effectiveness of fiscal spending in Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia: the role of trade openness and public debt level

Various structural characteristics of economies, directly or indirectly, affect the transmission from government stimuli to economic activity and determine the size of fiscal multipliers. In this article, we expand the standard Blanchard–Perotti fiscal SVAR model by incorporating the public debt and trade openness variables to assess the influence of these structural determinants on the effectiveness of fiscal spending in three selected former Yugoslav countries – Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. The results confirmed the main hypotheses, which state that public debt level and trade openness significantly affect the effectiveness of fiscal spending through the means of reduction in size of fiscal effects in all countries analysed. When comparing internationally, this reduction tends to be more evident in countries with a higher degree of average public debt level and trade openness.

The role of trade openness and investment in examining the energy-growth-pollution nexus: empirical evidence for China and India

ABSTRACTMost of the existing literature dealing with the relationship between carbon emissions, energy consumption and economic growth either suffers from ignoring relevant variables such as trade openness or investment, or suffers from using econometric methods that are unable to distinguish between short- and long-term causality and are not robust to the degree of integration of time series used for the analysis. This article suggests using the autoregressive distributed lag approach along with additional explanatory variables such as measures of trade and investment to shed a new light on the link between emissions, energy consumption and income in the two largest and energy-intensive developing economies: China and India. Our results, over the 1971–2009 period, provide evidence that investment plays a major role in shaping the relationship between carbon emissions, energy consumption and income in China while this is not the case in India. Furthermore, trade openness is found to play a key function in the short term in China but does not contribute to the emissions-energy-growth scenario in India.

Long-Run Drivers of Current Account Imbalances in the EU: The Role of Trade Openness

This paper investigates, using panel cointegration methods, the long-run drivers of current account imbalances in 15 EU member States during the period 1974-2011. We argue that the degree of trade openness greatly affects the relative strength of the different long-term drivers of current account imbalances. Our empirical results indicate that competitiveness factors strongly affect imbalances in countries with a low trade openness, while the effects weakens as trade openness increases. Similarly, we find evidence of a positive effects of government debt on current account deficits for high openness countries and a negative impact for medium and low openness countries. Our results suggest that the structural heterogeneity in the degree of openness across EU countries might be an important contributor to the diverging patterns in current account balances experienced in the last decades.

Exchange rate regimes and fiscal discipline: The role of trade openness

This study revisits the relationship between exchange rate regime (ERR) choice and fiscal discipline focusing on the role of trade openness. The conventional theoretical view is that fixed regimes bring about more fiscal discipline, while the recent literature argues that flexible regimes are more disciplinary. Empirical studies have provided mixed evidence. Using a panel dataset for a large number of developing and developed countries, as well as pooled panel OLS and instrumental variables (IV) estimation techniques, we find support for both views. We document that a fixed ERR is disciplinary at low levels of trade openness, while a flexible regime produces a greater fiscal discipline above a certain level of trade openness. Moreover, this relationship applies to only developing countries. These findings remain robust across different measures of fiscal outcomes, a number of controls, across different sub-samples, and are supported by both annual and five-year averaged panel data.

Pricing Behaviour and the Role of Trade Openness in the Transmission of Monetary Shocks

External demand is considered to be one of the channels of transmission of monetary policy to aggregate demand. If external demand matters in the monetary transmission, then the response of output to monetary shocks must be more pronounced in the sectors that are more open to trade and exposed to foreign competition. However, the empirical evidence is not conclusive. Using a New Keynesian open economy model, I show that the role of trade openness in the transmission of monetary shocks can be reversed completely by the degree of exchange-rate pass-through into import prices. If the pass-through is complete, traded output increases more than nontraded output after a positive monetary shock, if the pass-through is zero, traded output increases less. The lack of conclusive evidence on the role of external demand in the transmission of monetary shocks may also be explained by sectoral heterogeneity in price rigidity: if prices are more rigid in the nontraded sector, then it is not possible to find a positive correlation between the response of output to monetary shocks and the degree of openness, regardless of the degree of exchange rate pass-through.

Impact of Foreign Trade on Employment and Wages in Indian Manufacturing

This study attempts to investigate the impact of international trade on the manufacturing employment and wages in India over the period 1980–2005. Given India’s abundant labour force, the empirical evidence will provide an indication on the role of trade openness in labour market in terms of employment and wages. We employ three standard modelling approaches, namely, factor content, growth decomposition and panel data modelling approaches, to verify the role of trade on employment and wages. We use panel data at the industry level obtained from Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) and World Bank trade data set. Our results suggest that international trade has not had any significant impact on employment generation in the manufacturing sector in India. While there is little evidence on any significant effect of export orientation on employment, import penetration had a detrimental effect on employment generation.

Impact of Trade Openness, FDI, Exchange Rate and Inflation on Economic Growth: A Case Study of Pakistan

This study focuses on empirical analysis to find out the role of trade openness, inflation, imports, exports, real exchange rate and foreign direct investment in enhancing economic growth in Pakistan. The analysis based on time series data for the period 1980 to 2011. This paper uses ADF; PP and DF-GLS tests to find out stationarity of the variables and Co-integration and DOLS (Dynamic Ordinary Least Square) techniques have been used for the estimation. Co integration results indicated the long run relationship among the variables. However, negative impact of trade openness can be overcome by producing import substitutes and creating conditions for trade surplus. Furthermore, foreign direct investment and trade are considered vital elements that improve the influence of economic growth.

Carbon Emissions and Income Trajectory in Eight Heterogeneous Countries: The Role of Trade Openness, Energy Consumption and Population Dynamics

This paper examines the long-run and dynamic temporal relationships between economic growth, energy consumption, population density, trade openness, and carbon dioxide   (CO2) emissions in Brazil, China, Egypt, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, South Korea, and South Africa based on the environment Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis. We employ the ARDL Bounds test to cointegration and CUSUM and CUSUMSQ tests to ensure long-run cointegration and parameter stability. The estimated results show that the inverted U-shaped EKC hypothesis holds in Japan and South Korea. In the other six countries, the long-run relationship between economic growth and CO2 emissions follows an N-shaped trajectory and the estimated turning points are much higher than the sample mean. In addition, the results indicate that energy consumption Granger-causes both CO2 emissions and economic growth in all the countries. An important implication of our findings is that it would be ill-advised for the policy decision makers to adopt the EKC postulate as the conceptual basis for policies favoring economic growth unconditionally. A wide range of policy initiatives that would induce increased demand for better environment quality and its sustainability should be explored in tandem with measures to spur economic growth.

Role of trade openness and financial development in economic growth: panel evidence from South Asia

The dynamic impact of financial development and trade openness on economic growth is examined for five major South Asia countries over the period 1985–2010 in the panel co-integration and causality framework. The results reveal the existence of long-run relationship between economic growth, trade openness and financial development. Further, trade openness and financial development play an important and significant role for economic growth in South Asian countries. This analysis shows that there is bidirectional causality between economic growth, trade openness and financial development.

Determinants of civil war in post-colonial Asia, 1950-1992: the role of trade openness and economic development

Determinants of civil war in post-colonial Asia, 1950-1992: the role of trade openness and economic development

Welfare Effects of a Monetary Union: The Role of Trade Openness

This paper evaluates the welfare effects of a monetary union (MU), compared to a e oating exchange rate regime, using a quantitative business cycle model of a two-country world with sticky prices. It is assumed that, under a e oat, there are shocks to the uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) condition. These shocks are shown to have a negative effect on welfare— the detrimental effect is stronger, the higher the degree of trade openness. A MU eliminates UIP shocks, and it may thus raise welfare. The welfare gain from MU is positively linked to openness. (JEL: E4, F3, F4)