Trade policy changes, tax evasion and Benford's law

Demir, Banu; Javorcik, Beata Smarzynska

doi:10.1016/j.jdeveco.2020.102456

Cited by 22 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…So some of the “trade creation” measured by prior work may be attributable to less underreporting, not real shifts in trade patterns. To the extent that tariff evasion induces bias in estimation of trade elasticities, it can lead to inaccurate welfare calculations for the gains from trade (Demir & Javorcik, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Misreporting trade: Tariff evasion, corruption, and auditing standards

Kellenberg

Levinson

2018

Rev International Economics

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Official international trade statistics report commerce between every pair of countries twice: once for the importing country and once for the exporter. In principle, the two values differ only by transport costs, but as has long been recognized, they also differ systematically with product‐level tariffs. We aggregate across products to construct a dataset of annual aggregate bilateral trade, separately for the importer and exporter reports. With these data, we show that the reporting differences also vary systematically with country characteristics aside from tariffs: incomes, auditing standards, corruption, and trade agreements.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Misreporting trade: Tariff evasion, corruption, and auditing standards

Kellenberg

Levinson

2018

Rev International Economics

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“…For a discussion of re-exports and entrepôt trade in the context of China (Feenstra and Hanson,2004;and Feenstra et al, 1999). 8 "Recent literature considers import tariff evasion (Fisman and Wei, 2004;Demir and Javorcik, 2020). We do not expect that this significantly affects our conclusions.…”

Section: What Is Tim?mentioning

confidence: 88%

The Effects of Transit Systems on International Trade

et al. 2021

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In this paper, we estimate the trade effects of a transit system upgrading that streamlines border processing in developing countries. Our empirical approach combines transaction level export data from El Salvador with unique data that distinguishes export flows that were processed on the transit system. Our results indicate that the new transit system lowered regulatory border costs and raised exports. At the low end, our back-of-the-envelope estimate of the return to investment is US$ 3-to-1. The estimation results also suggest that existing frameworks that emphasize shipping frequency and the formation of new trade relationships are important to interpret trade facilitation policy. This evidence informs an important policy covered by the 2013 WTO Agreement of Trade Facilitation.

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“…Recently, Demir and Javorcik (2020) proposed a new method which makes use of a statistical test to detect import tax evasion. More specifically, they make use of the Benford's law, which provides the probability a number will appear as a leading digit 3 in a dataset.…”

Section: Quantifying "Missing" Tradementioning

confidence: 99%

The Routledge Handbook of Smuggling

Gallien¹,

Weigand²

2021

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Trade policy changes, tax evasion and Benford's law

Cited by 22 publications

References 24 publications

Misreporting trade: Tariff evasion, corruption, and auditing standards

Misreporting trade: Tariff evasion, corruption, and auditing standards

The Effects of Transit Systems on International Trade

The Routledge Handbook of Smuggling

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