Trade Facilitation and Country Size

Amin, Mohammad ; Haidar, Jamal Ibrahim

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ACCESS;    ADVERSE EFFECT;    BILATERAL TRADE;    BORDER TRADE;    BTN;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-6692
RP-ID  :  WPS6692

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

It is argued that compared with largecountries, small countries rely more on trade and thereforethey are more likely to adopt liberal trading policies. Thepresent paper extends this idea beyond the conventionaltrade openness measures by analyzing the relationshipbetween country size and the number of documents required toexport and import, a measure of trade facilitation. Threeimportant results follow. First, trade facilitation doesimprove as country size becomes smaller; that is, smallcountries perform better than large countries in terms oftrade facilitation. Second, the relationship between countrysize and trade facilitation is nonlinear, much stronger forthe relatively small than the large countries. Third,contrary to what existing studies might suggest, therelationship between country size and trade facilitationdoes not appear to be driven by the fact that smallcountries trade more as a proportion of their gross domesticproduct than the large countries.