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This paper attempts to measure the effect of resource misallocation on aggregate manufacturing total factor productivity, focusing on Vietnamese manufacturing firms during the period 2000–2009. One of the major findings of this paper is that there would have been substantial improvement in aggregate total factor productivity in Viet Nam in the absence of distortions. The results imply that potential productivity gains from removing distortions in Vietnamese manufacturing are large. We also find that smaller firms tend to face advantageous distortions, while larger firms tend to face disadvantageous ones. Moreover, the efficient size distribution is more dispersed than the actual size distribution. These results suggest that Viet Nam's policies may constrain its largest and most efficient producers, and coddle its smallest and least efficient ones.

This study analyzes the impacts of free trade agreements (FTAs) on bilateral trade, focusing on Japan’s FTAs. In particular, we examined both static and dynamic effects at the aggregated and disaggregated levels, using two datasets between 1995 and 2016 for Japanese trade only and world trade. For the static analysis, we investigated the overall impacts and the effect of individual FTAs. Regarding dynamic analysis, we considered the time since their enactment. Our results indicate that the impacts are heterogeneous among Japan’s FTAs and products, with a trade creation effect for some FTA partners. Moreover, our findings reveal that the trade creation effect is probably overestimated when trade between the third countries is not considered. We also found a positive dynamic effect for some products. Such a dynamic effect may emerge due to a longer time for firms to understand FTAs and learn their use and the gradual tariff reduction for some products.

This paper investigates the trade creation effects of Japan's free trade agreements (FTAs) using aggregate trade data for the years 1996–2015. We estimate various specifications of a gravity model. Our main finding is that the effects of Japan's FTAs are not clearly observed when the gravity model is specified with three types of fixed effects (i.e., exporter-year fixed effects, importer-year fixed effects, and country-pair fixed effects). In fact, the effects of FTAs vary substantially among trade partners and around half of the FTAs increase Japan's trade values. Our results also suggest that FTAs with small trade partners tend to have large effects on Japan as well as other countries. Recently enforced FTAs, however, increase Japan's import values more rapidly.

Tariff pass-through is a vital issue for considering who and to what extent the trade liberalization benefits. This paper empirically examines the tariff pass-through in wholesaling by employing the wholesale firm-level data in Japan. We found that importing wholesalers significantly raised their margin ratio (i.e., (sales -procurements) / sales) against tariff reduction. On average, a 1% reduction of tariffs raised the margin ratio by around 0.25 percentage point. This rise is equivalent to the rise of sales prices to procurement prices by around 0.34%. For comparison purposes, we also analyzed tariff pass-through for the import and consumer prices and found that a 1% reduction of tariffs raised import prices (export prices for exporters) by 0.49% and decreased consumer prices by 0.08%. In sum, wholesalers in importing country enjoy the smaller part of tariff rent than producers in exporting country but the larger part than consumers in importing country.