Using unit value indices as proxies for international merchandise trade prices

Trends in Canada’s Merchandise Trade

• Over the post-war period, Canada has become more and more integrated with the world economy through an increase in its export orientation, heavier reliance on imported intermediate inputs, and more exposure to foreign competition in its domestic markets. These trends have become more accentuated in the last decade under the impetus of the Free Trade Agreement and the diffusion of information ...

Asymmetric industrial energy prices and international trade

This paper measures the response of bilateral trade flows to differences in industrial energy prices across countries. Using a panel for the period 1996-2011 including 42 countries, 62 sectors and covering 60% of global merchandise trade, we estimate the short-run effects of sector-level energy price asymmetry on trade. We find that changes in relative energy prices have a statistically signifi...

International Trade Effects of Value-Added Taxation

Factor Prices and International Trade: A Unifying Perspective

How do trade liberalizations a¤ect relative factor prices and to what extent do they cause factors to reallocate across sectors? We …rst present a general accounting framework that nests a wide range of models that have been used to study the link between globalization and factor prices and from which we obtain two su¢ cient statistics that determine factor prices. Under some restrictions, chan...

How Important are Trade Prices for Trade Flows?

U.S. imports and exports respond little to exchange rate changes in the short run. Pricing behavior has long been thought central to explaining this response: if local prices do not respond to exchange rates, neither will trade flows. Sticky prices and strategic complementarities in price setting generate sluggish responses, and they are necessary to match newly available international micro pr...