T his study investigates the effects of extra-ECOWAS merchandise trade and investment flows on the transmission of business cycles in the selected ECOWAS between 1985 and 2014.  The study finds that total trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) significantly influence the transmission of business cycles with elasticities of 1.1 and 0.7, respectively in the long run. There are little vari...

China and ASEAN have been maintaining a relationship both cooperative and competitive in the textile trade. Due to its labor intensive feature and high dependence on foreign trade , the textile trade has received much attention after the 2008 financial crisis. The customs data (classified by the HS code) from year 2006-2009 is employed to research the impact of the crisis on the trade pattern o...

How do foreign trade and foreign direct investment affect regional inequality? Foreign trade and investment may affect internal economic geography, and the resulting industry agglomeration may contribute to regional inequality. This paper provides empirical evidence supporting this linkage. The results indicate that the increasing regional inequality in China has been accompanied by an increase...

Using a gravity model of trade and the U.S. and Chinese panel data, I present evidence that supports the views that linguistic links have become more important in foreign trade than geographical proximity and that linguistic influence on trade is more significant in China than in the U.S. The estimated result based on a broad panel of economies shows little overall relation between religious si...

China experienced a sharp increase in wage inequality between unskilled and skilled workers in the late 1990s. Using a sample of 1,500 firms in five Chinese cities with available data for 1998 and 2000, we investigate the role of technology and foreign trade in determining China’s wage inequality. We find evidence that conditional on the technology deployed, trade reduces wage inequality in exp...

In order to evaluate the development levels of countries, economic growth along with environmental quality account for important indices nowadays. The impacts of environmental quality (based on environmental performance index), the direct foreign investment, and trade openness on economic growth in selected developing countries have been scrutinized in the present study. In the present study th...