In the Wake of the Global Crisis : Evidence from a New Quarterly Database of Export Competitiveness

Gaulier, Guillaume ; Santoni, Gianluca ; Taglioni, Daria ; Zignago, Soledad

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ADVANCED COUNTRIES;    ADVANCED ECONOMIES;    AGGREGATION TECHNIQUES;    ANNUAL GROWTH;    AVERAGE PRICE;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-6733
RP-ID  :  WPS6733

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Over the past two decades, internationaltrade has become a privileged engine of growth for much ofthe developing world. With the global economy evolvingcontinuously and rapidly, countries must pay close attentionto their positioning on the map of global trade andproduction. Within this framework, countries must alsobecome aware of how they fare relative to competitors and totheir past export performance. Of particular importance isthe extent to which their performance is driven by exporterown supply-side capacity as opposed to external orcompositional factors, including product and geographicalspecialization and how these trends compare acrosscountries. This paper describes a new initiative that usesquarterly data for 2005q1-2013q1 to compute comparableindicators of export performance for 228 countries andterritories. The database, the Export CompetitivenessDatabase, reveals interesting patterns in trade performance.Export performance, stripped of compositional effects, wasstrongest for countries from the Asia and Pacific region, onaverage. Moreover, such performance was almost entirelydriven by exporting country specific factors, with changesreflecting growth in volume rather than price developments.All emerging and developing regions have, on average,improved export performance. The indicators in the databasetrace the legacy of supply-side capacity and the overallexport performance of the double-dip recession in the euroarea. An illustrative set of results suggests that thepaper's measure of competitiveness correlates to acountry's nominal and real effective exchange rate,factors that are commonly perceived as importantdeterminants of competitiveness.