Reassessing the productivity gains from trade liberalization

Domestic productivity and variety gains from trade

JEL classification: F1 F12 We show theoretically and confirm empirically that domestic productivity has a significant impact on the demand for foreign varieties under the assumption that domestic and foreign varieties are imperfect substitutes. In particular, the demand for imported varieties ismore elastic for countries with comparative advantage. For an average good facing a median trade barr...

Reassessing the Productivity Gains from Trade Liberalization; by JaeBin Ahn, Era Dabla-Norris, Romain Duval, Bingjie Hu and Lamin Njie; IMF Working Paper WP/16/77; March 2016

This paper reassesses the impact of trade liberalization on productivity. We build a new, unique database of effective tariff rates at the country-industry level for a broad range of countries over the past two decades. We then explore both the direct effect of liberalization in the sector considered, as well as its indirect impact in downstream industries via input linkages. Our findings point...

Trade liberalization, supply chains and productivity

This paper investigates the impact of trade liberalization on productivity in Vietnam. The gradual opening up of markets to trade over the course of the last decade culminating with the WTO accession in 2007 makes Vietnam an ideal case for exploring this issue. We use microdata on the population of manufacturing enterprises for the period 2001 to 2010 and match these to data on exports and impo...

Trade Liberalization and Productivity Growth: Firm-level Evidence from Cameroon

Does trade liberalization foster total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the manufacturing sector? Does sectoral trade orientation determine sectoral TFP levels and growth rates? These questions are addressed using pooled pre-and post-liberalization panel data from Cameroonian firms of eight manufacturing industries. A single production function for the whole manufacturing sector is estimated...

The “Gains” from Preferential Trade Liberalization in the CGE Models: Where do they Come From?