Economic Integration and the Two Margins of Trade: The Impact of the Barcelona Process on North African Countries' Exports

Bensassi, Sami; Márquez‐Ramos, Laura; Martínez‐Zarzoso, Inmaculada

doi:10.1093/jae/ejr038

Cited by 23 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Amurgo Pacheco (2006) and Benassi et al (2010)). A main conclusion is, however, that export of new products answers for a minor share of total export expansion, which concerns essentially the products that were already exported prior to the start of the Barcelona process.…”

Section: Limits Of Euro-med Integrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reaping the Benefits of Deeper Euro-Med Integration Through Trade Facilitation

Bourdet

Persson

2011

SSRN Journal

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The current political turmoil in the Arab world has contributed to renewed interest in the Barcelona Process and how it can be improved in order to promote inclusive growth in the non-EU Mediterranean countries. In this paper, we explore whether deeper integration in the form of trade facilitation -i.e. improved and simplified trade procedures -could be an important part of a reform agenda. Adopting a Southern perspective by focusing on exports from non-EU Mediterranean countries to the EU, we use data from the World Bank's Doing Business Database on the efficiency of trade procedures to formally test whether the efficiency of trade procedures affects (i) bilateral volumes of exports, and (ii) the number of products that are exported. We find that improving export and import procedures to the best practice levels (for each group of countries) is likely to increase the value of non-EU Mediterranean exports by 34% and to increase the number of products exported by non-EU Mediterranean countries by 21%. A main implication of the results is therefore that more efforts should to be devoted to trade facilitation in order to reap the benefits of deeper integration between the two groups of countries. JEL classification: C23, F15, O24

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Section: Limits Of Euro-med Integrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reaping the Benefits of Deeper Euro-Med Integration Through Trade Facilitation

Bourdet

Persson

2011

SSRN Journal

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“…For instance, Baier et al (2014) and Márquez-Ramos et al (2015) adopted the intensive versus extensive decomposition proposed by Hummels, Klenow (2005), while Bensassi et al (2012) based their approach on the decomposition of trade proposed by Hillberry, Hummels (2008). These studies define the EM at sector-product level although it can be defined at different levels of aggregation such as firm or country level (Santos-Silva et al 2014).…”

Section: Background and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For the EM we can therefore distinguish between the appearance of trade in new products and in new markets. Although recent gravity literature has mainly focused on product diversification (Bensassi et al 2012, Baier et al 2014, Márquez-Ramos et al 2015, the EM in the pure sense of the term can be defined as those exports that provide new market entrants, while the IM in the pure sense is a result of continued growth in existing exporters' sales to the same destinations (Florensa et al 2015). Thus, in the present paper we focus on international diversification while acknowledging that there might be a trade-off between product diversification and international diversification due to limited resources (Meyer et al 2011).…”

Section: Background and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Institutional Environment in International Trade. The Case of Spanish Regions

Márquez‐Ramos

2016

REGION

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Abstract. We move beyond the nation-state as the unit of analysis and use subnational spatial variation to study the effect of the institutional environment on international trade. Additionally, we address the heterogeneous effect of trade agreements on different regions within a country. Employing a gravity model approach, we use a region-to-country dataset to estimate the determinants of Spanish regional exports and we apply quantile regressions for panel data. We find that better institutional quality of trade agreements leads to an increase in both the intensive and the extensive margins of trade. The institutional quality of trade agreements exerts a differential effect on regional exports at different locations within a country, although differences across Spanish regions seem to be larger for the intensive margin than for the extensive margin. However, we do find a common trend: for the relatively more important exporting regions the institutional quality of trade agreements is less relevant for trade margins. Therefore, our results posit that subnational spatial variation should be added to the analysis of the determinants of international trade flows.JEL classification: F14, F15, F55, R10

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Section: _________________________mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More specifically, the bilateral interim agreement between the EU and Egypt, signed in 2004, will gradually eliminate tariffs on imported products from the EU and eventually increase competition, thus forcing some firms to exit the market. Simultaneously, decreases in trade costs generated by more flexible rules of origin (RoO) for products traded with the EU had a positive effect on Egyptian exports (Bensassi et al 2011).The main results show that export and import activities have common sunk costs and that those are higher for import than for export activities. Past Total Factor Productivity (TFP) levels explain the decision to import, but not the decision to export and firms with foreign ownership are more prone to export.…”

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confidence: 92%

Imported Inputs and Egyptian Exports: Exploring the Links

Parra

Martínez‐Zarzoso

2015

Economics

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This paper is the first to explore the links between exporting and importing activities of Egyptian firms using panel data over the period from 2003 to 2007. The main aim is twofold. Firstly, the authors report regression results indicating that firms that both export and import are the most productive, followed by importing-, exporting-only firms and non-traders. Secondly, they estimate the determinants of the extensive and intensive margins of exports and imports using dynamic panel-Probit and panel-Tobit models in combination with the method proposed by Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondal (Avoiding biased versions of Wooldridge's simple solution to the initial conditions problem, 2013) to tackle the initial conditions problem. The results show that both activities present a high degree of hysteresis, which is higher for imports than for exports pointing to the existence of sunk costs in both activities. Moreover, past productivity does affect the extensive margin of imports, but not of exports and the initial condition status is also only relevant for the import side. Similar outcomes are obtained for the intensive margin of trade. JEL F14Keywords Firm level data; Egypt; internationalization; imports; exports; intermediates Authors María Dolores Parra, Research Group of Industry and Territory, Department of Economics -CREIP, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43204 Reus, Catalonia, Spain, and Institute of International Economics, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, 12071, Spain, mparra@eco.uji.es Inmaculada Martínez-Zarzoso, Department of Economics, University of Göttingen, 37001 Göttingen, Germany, and Institute of International Economics, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, 12071, Spain Citation María Dolores Parra and Inmaculada Martínez-Zarzoso (2015). Imported Inputs and Egyptian Exports: Exploring the Links. Economics: The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, 9 (2015-38): 1-31. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5018/economics-ejournal.ja. www.economics-ejournal.org 2 IntroductionIn recent years, there has been a growing interest in the study of the internationalization strategies of small-and medium-size firms in developing countries. According to the related trade literature, a high proportion of trading firms are engaged in both importing and exporting activities. Kasahara and Lapham (2013) show that this is due to the presence of cost complementarities in both activities. Once one of the activities is carried out, the second becomes easier. These cost complementarities have motivated a new strand of research that further investigates the relationship between import and export activities at the firm level, especially those focused on the use of imported intermediates and their role in enhancing exports (Muûls and Pisu 2009;Bas 2012;Aristei et al. 2013;Kasahara and Lapham 2013;Lo Turco and Maggioni 2013). While most of the existent literature on the relationship between productivity and import and export activities has focused on developed countries, the literature concerning developing countries is still scarce. In particu...

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Economic Integration and the Two Margins of Trade: The Impact of the Barcelona Process on North African Countries' Exports

Cited by 23 publications

References 22 publications

Reaping the Benefits of Deeper Euro-Med Integration Through Trade Facilitation

Reaping the Benefits of Deeper Euro-Med Integration Through Trade Facilitation

The Role of Institutional Environment in International Trade. The Case of Spanish Regions

Imported Inputs and Egyptian Exports: Exploring the Links

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