Institutions, Infrastructure, and Trade

Francois, Joseph ; Manchin, Miriam

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ADMINISTRATIVE BURDENS;    AIR;    AIR TRANSPORT;    APPLIED TARIFF;    BILATERAL TARIFF;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-4152
RP-ID  :  WPS4152

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

The authors examine the influence ofinfrastructure, institutional quality, colonial andgeographic context, and trade preferences on the pattern ofbilateral trade. They are interested in threshold effects,and so emphasize those cases where bilateral country pairsdo not actually trade. The authors depart from theinstitutions and infrastructure literature in this respect,using selection-based gravity modeling of trade flows. Theyalso depart from this literature by mixing principalcomponents (to condense the institutional and infrastructuremeasures) with a focus on deviations in the resultingindexes from expected values for given income cohorts tocontrol for multicollinearity. The authors work with a panelof 284,049 bilateral trade flows from 1988 to 2002. Matchingbilateral trade and tariff data and controlling for tariffpreferences, level of development, and standard distancemeasures, they find that infrastructure and institutionalquality are significant determinants not only of exportlevels, but also of the likelihood exports will take placeat all. Their results support the notion that exportperformance, and the propensity to take part in the tradingsystem at all, depends on institutional quality and accessto well-developed transport and communicationsinfrastructure. Indeed, this dependence is far moreimportant, empirically, than variations in tariffs inexplaining sample variations in North-South trade.