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Journal Article
The effects of a booming economy on the U.S. trade deficit
The robust growth of the U.S. economy between 1996 and 1999 spurred U.S. demand for foreign goods and contributed to a surge in the U.S. trade deficit. An analysis of the effects of the expansion on the trade balance suggests that the economic boom can account for roughly a third of the sharp rise in the merchandise trade deficit during this period.
Working Paper
Structural change in an open economy
We study the importance of international trade in structural change. Our framework has both productivity and trade cost shocks, and allows for non-unitary income and substitution elasticities. We calibrate our model to investigate South Korea's structural change between 1971 and 2005. We find that the shock processes, propagated through the model's two main transmission mechanisms, non-homothetic preferences and the open economy, explain virtually all of the evolution of agriculture and services labor shares, and the rising part of the hump-shape in manufacturing. Counterfactual exercises ...
Report
Can world real interest rates explain business cycles in a small open economy?
While the world real interest rate is potentially an important mechanism for transmitting international shocks to small open economies, much of the recent quantitative research that studies this mechanism concludes that it has little effect on output, investment, and net exports. We reexamine the importance of world real interest rate shocks using an approach that reverses the standard real business cycle methodology. We begin with a small open economy business cycle model. But, rather than specifying the stochastic processes for the shocks, and then solving and simulating the model to ...
Report
The growth of world trade
The growth in the trade share of output is one of the most important features of the world economy since World War II. We show that an important propagation mechanism for this growth is vertical specialization. Simply put, vertical specialization occurs when imported inputs are used to produce goods that are then exported. We show that many of the standard trade models - the Ricardian model, the monopolistic competition model, and the international real business cycle models - cannot explain the growth in trade unless very high elasticities of demand and substitution are assumed. We then use ...
Report
Can vertical specialization explain the growth of world trade?
The growth in the trade share of output is one of the most important features of the world economy since World War II. The growth is generally thought to have been generated by falling tariff barriers worldwide. This thinking, however, does not square with standard static and dynamic international trade models. Because tariff barriers have decreased little since the early 1960s, these models cannot explain the growth of trade without assuming counterfactually large elasticities of substitution between domestic and foreign goods. I show that this growth can be reconciled with the relatively ...
Working Paper
A tale of two states: Maharashtra and West Bengal
In this paper the authors study the economic evolution between 1960 and 1995 of two states in India ? Maharashtra and West Bengal. In 1960, West Bengal?s per capita income exceeded that of Maharashtra. By 1995, it had fallen to just 69 percent of Maharashtra?s per capita income. The authors employ a "wedge" methodology based on the first order conditions of a multi-sector neoclassical growth model to ascertain the sources of the divergent economic performances. Their diagnostic analysis reveals that a large part of West Bengal?s development woes can be attributed to: (a) low sectoral ...
Working Paper
How much of South Korea's growth miracle can be explained by trade policy?
South Korea's growth miracle has been well documented. A large set of institutional and policy reforms in the early 1960s is thought to have contributed to the country's extraordinary performance. In this paper, the authors assess the importance of one key set of policies, the trade policy reforms in Korea, as well as the concurrent GATT tariff reductions. They develop a model of neoclassical growth and trade that highlights two forces by which lower trade barriers can lead to increased per worker GDP: comparative advantage and specialization, and capital accumulation. The authors calibrate ...
Discussion Paper
How Rich Will China Become?
China?s impressive economic growth since the 1980s raises the question of how much richer it will become over future decades. Its growing share of the world economy affects other national economies. Understanding the future course of the Chinese economy is therefore important for both fiscal and monetary policymaking in the United States and elsewhere. Using fundamental growth theory, data from China and from Korea and Japan?s similar ?miracle? growth experiences, we provide a suggestive calculation for China?s future per capita income. Our ballpark estimate is that China?s per capita income ...
Working Paper
Trade Integration, Global Value Chains, and Capital Accumulation
Motivated by increasing trade and fragmentation of production across countries since World War II, we build a dynamic two-country model featuring sequential, multi-stage production and capital accumulation. As trade costs decline over time, global-value-chain (GVC) trade expands across countries, particularly more in the faster growing country, consistent with the empirical pattern. The presence of GVC trade boosts capital accumulation and economic growth and magnifies dynamic gains from trade. At the same time, endogenous capital accumulation shapes comparative advantage across countries, ...
Journal Article
Vertical specialization and the changing nature of world trade
A major feature of globalization has been the enormous increase in international flows of goods and services: countries are now trading much more with each other. In this article, the authors demonstrate the greater role vertical specialization is playing in these increased flows. Vertical specialization occurs when a country uses imported intermediate parts to create a good it later exports--that is, the country links sequentially with other countries to produce a final good. Deriving evidence from four case studies as well as OECD input-output tables, the authors reveal that vertical ...