How important are the distributional effects of international trade? This has been one of the most central questions pursued by international economists, particularly because much of the public opposition towards increased openness is due to the belief that welfare changes are unevenly distributed. In this dissertation, I rely on counterfactual analysis and natural experiments to study topics of international trade, welfare and inequality in the context of both developing and developed economies. In particular, I combine theoretical modeling and empirical analysis to examine the effects of international trade on (1) real wages of individuals within and across countries; (2) within-sector wage dispersion caused by heterogeneous responses of firms with different productivity levels to cheaper imported inputs. In each of the three chapters, I contribute to the existing literature by relaxing simplifying assumptions that have proved to be inconsistent with data and exploring new mechanisms that link international trade to inequality. Chapter 1, “Trade and Real Wages with Demand and Productivity Heterogeneity,” presents a general equilibrium model that incorporates the effects of trade liberalization on both an individual’s nominal wage and consumer price index. A vast majority of the literature focuses on the income channel, which is its effect on the distribution of nominal wages across workers. A small number of studies consider the expenditure channel, which is its differential impact on consumer price indices. It is well known that the consumption baskets of high-income and low-income consumers look very different. To our knowledge, there are only three case studies that have looked at these two channels jointly for individual countries, Argentina, Mexico and India. We provide a unified framework incorporating both channels by allowing for non-homothetic preferences and worker heterogeneity across jobs. In spite of its many dimensions of heterogeneity at the individual level, the model remains tractable enough that allows us to estimate its key parameters and perform counterfactuals. Chapter 2, “Trade and Real Wage Inequality: Cross-Country Evidence,” addresses the following question: what is the impact of trade liberalization on the distribution of real wages in a large cross-section of countries? Trade liberalization affects real-wage inequality through two channels: the distribution of nominal wages across workers and, if the rich and the poor consume different bundles of goods, the distribution of price indices across consumers. Prior work has focused mostly on one or the other of these channels, but no paper has studied both jointly for a large set of countries. Based on the theoretical framework in Chapter 1, I measure the distributional effects of trade liberalization incorporating both channels for a sample of 40 countries. More specifically, I parametrize the model using sector-level trade and production data. Because skill-intensive goods are also high-income elastic in the data, I find an intuitive, previously unexplored, and strong interaction between the two channels. According to my counterfactual analysis, trade cost reductions generate dramatically different results for both nominal wage inequality and price index inequality than what previous research has obtained by focusing on either channel alone. I find that trade cost reductions decrease the relative nominal wage of the poor and the relative price index for the poor in all countries. On net, real-wage inequality falls everywhere. Chapter 3, “Imported Inputs and Within-Sector Wage Dispersion,” proposes a new mechanism through which trade liberalization affects income inequality within a country: the use of imported inputs. Intuitively, a firm with higher initial productivity is better at using higher quality foreign inputs. This justifies paying the fixed costs for a larger set of imported inputs when input tariff liberalization decreases their relative price. The firm becomes more import intensive, which enhances its productivity advantage. As a result, the firm hires higher quality workers, produces higher quality products and pays higher wages to its workers, increasing within-sector wage dispersion. We find that both the mean and the dispersion of the distribution of firm productivity, markup and size went up during a period when China reduced its tariffs on imported inputs. More importantly, these results still hold when we consider the subset of firms that survived throughout the sample period, from 1998 to 2007. In addition, we develop a partial-equilibrium, heterogeneous-firm model with endogenous imported inputs and labor quality choice that is consistent with these observations. Finally, we provide empirical evidence that supports the model’s prediction that the differential change in the import intensity of firms with different productivity levels explains these patterns.

acase@tulane.edu / The arrival of World War II triggered significant disturbances in global trade, forcing U.S. importers and exporters to find alternative sources of business to make up for lost markets in Europe and Asia. This study traces the efforts of business and civic leaders in Houston, New Orleans, and Miami to increase trade, transportation, and tourism income from Latin America and the Caribbean by adopting Pan Americanism as a business strategy. Businessmen and local civic officials believed they could combine new trade promotion institutions with a carefully cultivated Pan American civic identity to establish their cities as “gateways” to the Americas. This framework became a key component of the regional competition between Houston, New Orleans, and Miami in the late 1940s and 1950s. The implications for these Pan American business strategies stretched far beyond the Gulf South, however. Business and civic leaders often described their activities within the context of U.S.-Latin American diplomacy, connecting trade promotion and international relationship-building with broader national objectives of hemispheric cooperation and anticommunism. This connection attracted the interest of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, whose officials hoped to leverage the influence of private enterprise to achieve Latin American economic development and discourage anti-foreign investment policies without significant government funding. Both local business communities and federal agencies used this harmony of vision to their advantage. Washington found ways to co-opt the Pan American business strategies of the Gulf South while local civic and business leaders drew legitimacy and sometimes even financial support for their programs from the federal government. Ultimately, for a variety of reasons, Pan Americanism eventually became unprofitable as a business strategy, and most of the institutions Houston, New Orleans, and Miami had established either failed or changed considerably by the 1970s. The lasting legacy of this phenomenon, however, lies in the frameworks these cities helped establish for reimagining the port city as a diplomatic space and business communities as diplomatic agents. / 1 / Joshua Goodman

This dissertation consists of two chapters. The first chapter addresses the role of trade barriers in explaining differences in the relative prices of tradables across countries. The second chapter assesses the quantitative importance of changes in comparative advantage in explaining the changes in the compositions of exports and output in South Korea during its growth miracle. In the first chapter I quantitatively address the role of trade barriers in explaining the cross-country distribution of the price of nontradables relative to tradables. Relative prices of nontradables are higher in rich countries than in poor countries. The standard explanation for this is due to Balassa (1964) and Samuelson (1964), where, in each country, the relative price of nontradables is equal to the inverse of relative productivity, and relative productivity is higher in poor countries. I construct a multi-country model of trade in which countries face asymmetric trade barriers. There are many tradable goods and trade barriers determine the cross-country pattern of specialization across tradable goods. The realized pattern of specialization determines measured productivity in the tradables sector, which determines relative prices. Existing trade barriers account for half of the difference in relative prices between rich and poor countries. In the second chapter, I explore how the evolution of comparative advantage can explain the changes in the compositions of exports and output that occurred in South Korea during its growth miracle. From 1960 to 1995 manufacture's share in both exports and output increased. I embed a dynamic, multi-country model of trade into a three-sector model of structural change where agriculture, manufactures, and services are complementary in both consumption and production. I measure productivity growth, in each sector for each country, using a growth accounting procedure. I feed the productivity growth rates into the model and find that the increase in manufacture's share in exports and output are explained by a shift in comparative advantage. The model also matches other aspects of the compositions: the declines in both agriculture's and service's share in exports, and the decline in agriculture's share in output. Finally, the model tracks the composition of output for other countries.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Political Science Department, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 30-32)

<p>In most African countries the private sector provides the main impetus for economic growth, especially since countries started opening up their economics for foreign investment. Foreign investments have played an important role in the economic growth and development process. Consequently, the purpose of this work was to analyse the consequences of having a MAI in light of the proposed OECD Agreement, the implications it may have for developing countries in Africa, and the way forward towards a balanced multilateral Agreement.</p>

There are many factors that affect international agricultural trade. One of them is international transportation costs. Another important factor is non-tariff barriers such as sanitary and phytosanitary regulations caused by animal disease outbreaks. The main purpose of this dissertation was to analyze how these factors interfere in the international agricultural trade by examining three cases. In Chapter II, a spatial price equilibrium model of the international cotton sector was utilized to evaluate the effects of the Panama Canal expansion (PCE) on the world cotton industry. Three scenarios were evaluated by reducing ocean freight rates from U.S. Gulf and Atlantic ports to Asian destinations. All scenarios suggested that cotton exports from U.S. Gulf and Atlantic ports would considerably increase. On the other hand, the West Coast ports decreased its participation in total U.S. cotton exports. Overall, total U.S. cotton exports were expected to increase due to the PCE. By using the same model which was used in Chapter II, the third chapter analyzes port improvements in Brazil. By March of 2012, the port of Salvador is expected to have undergone relevant improvements. As a result, the port of Salvador is expected to attract ocean shipping companies which are willing to export directly to Asian importing markets. Scenarios with different reductions in cotton export cost for this port were examined. In general, results indicated a shift in Brazil cotton export flows from the port of Santos to the port of Salvador as well as an increase in exports and producer revenues for the country. Finally, in Chapter IV, the impacts of the 2005 FMD outbreak on the Brazilian meat market was examined. The imposition of an import ban by Russia on Brazilian meat exports was also investigated. By using time series methods, it was found that the outbreak along with the import ban caused a temporary negative price shock to the Brazilian meat market. Export pork and export chicken prices were found to not fully recover after the removal of the import ban by Russia. On the other hand, the export beef price was indicated to undergo a complete recovery.

This dissertation comprises three essays. In the first two chapters, I examine the performance of Chinese firms in the context of trade liberalization: one chapter looks at the quality of China's exports and the other investigates the productivity impact of China's tariff reduction. In the third chapter, I study the change induced by a tax reform in the institutional incentive structure faced by Chinese village leaders.

This historical study focuses on the multilateral regulation of sugar to provide a broader institutional history of trade law. I argue that theories of development and tensions between the global North and South have always been central to the formation, function, and transformation of international trade institutions. Sugar consistently appears as a commodity throughout the history of modern trade law. The sugar trade provides an immediate way for us to work through larger questions of development, free trade, and economic world order. I examine the 1902 Brussels Sugar Convention, the 1937 International Sugar Agreement (ISA), and the 1977 ISA. These international agreements provide a narrative of the development ideas and concerns that were a central feature of the trade institutions that preceded the World Trade Organization. In the context of the sugar trade over the last century, very few challenged the idea of free trade. Instead, they debated over what free trade meant. The justification for free trade and the function of those international institutions charged to implement trade agreements has changed throughout history. Yet, despite multiple historical and doctrinal definitions of free trade, two dynamics remain consistent: trade law has always been configured by the relationship between policies of tariff reduction and market stabilization and has been defined by the tension between industrial and agricultural interests.