Contracting institutions and product quality

Food Competition in World Markets: Some Evidence from a Panel Data Analysis of Top Exporting Countries

“…Our database considers goods at a high level of disaggregation, given by the four‐digit level of the SITC. Moreover, a recent paper by Essaji and Fujiwara () shows that AUVs and more sophisticated ad hoc indicators of goods quality yield the same analytical results. This justifies our decision to use the more commonly used and easier to compute export prices as proxies of goods quality.…”

“…Before estimating equation (1), we perform a panel Granger causality test to verify the existence of any statistical causal effect between export volumes, relative prices and world income, an issue somewhat overlooked in the empirical literature on the 12 Our database considers goods at a high level of disaggregation, given by the four-digit level of the SITC. Moreover, a recent paper by Essaji and Fujiwara (2012) shows that AUVs and more sophisticated ad hoc indicators of goods quality yield the same analytical results. This justifies our decision to use the more commonly used and easier to compute export prices as proxies of goods quality.…”

Contracting Institutions, Agro‐food Trade and Product Quality

“…Given the fact that surges in agro‐food exports and food quality upgrading have been dominant features of the transformation of the agro‐food sector, there are no obvious reasons to expect that the trade flows or the quality of food products observed in a particular year could have affected the quality of institutions observed 5 years earlier. Moreover, to address the endogeneity concerns more explicitly, we use an instrumental variable approach based on Essaji and Fujiwara (), who instrumented countries’ judicial quality using data on countries’ population density, urbanisation rate and European settler mortality in 1500. This strategy follows Acemoglu et al .…”

“…() show that trade liberalisation has led to a surge in imports of intermediate inputs and that the improved access to foreign inputs has had a large impact on firm productivity and the scope of product offerings at the firm level . Another related paper is that by Essaji and Fujiwara () who test whether contracting institutions affect specialisation in higher or lower quality goods and find that countries with higher quality institutions tend to export higher‐quality varieties of goods. While these papers are similar to ours, they are not concerned with the determinants of the pattern of export and products quality in the agro‐food sector…”

Moving up the global value chain in Latvia

“…Latvian firms can also boost their productivity through outsourcing by specialising in the most competitive and profitable activities. Countries with efficient judiciary systems are found to be particularly more competitive in industries that rely on a wide range of intermediate inputs and in the production of higher value-added goods within an industry (Levchenko, 2007;Essaji and Fujiwara, 2012). More generally, stronger rule of law boosts economic growth by encouraging innovation and increasing the effectiveness of other policies enhancing competition and resource allocation (Guillemette et al, 2017).…”