We study international trade in a model where consumers have non-homothetic preferences and where household income restricts the extensive margin of consumption. In equilibrium, monopolistic producers set high (low) prices in rich (poor) countries but a threat of parallel trade restricts the scope of price discrimination between countries. The threat of parallel trade allows differences in per capita incomes to have a strong impact on the extensive margin of trade, whereas differences in population sizes have a weaker effect. We also show that the welfare gains from trade liberalization are biased towards rich countries. We extend our model to more than two countries; to unequal incomes within countries; and to more general specifications of non-homothetic preferences. Our basic results are robust to these extensions.JEL classification: F10, F12, F19
We incorporate consumption indivisibilities into the Krugman (1980) model and show that an importer's per capita income becomes a primary determinant of "export zeros". Households in the rich North (poor South) are willing to pay high (low) prices for consumer goods; hence, unconstrained monopoly pricing generates arbitrage opportunities for internationally traded products. Export zeros arise because some northern firms abstain from exporting to the South, to avoid international arbitrage. Rich countries benefit from a trade liberalization, while poor countries lose. These results hold also under more general preferences with both extensive and intensive consumption margins. We show that a standard calibrated trade model (that ignores arbitrage) generates predictions on relative prices that violate noarbitrage constraints in many bilateral trade relations. This suggests that international arbitrage is potentially important.
Summary
Gross domestic product (GDP) is a key summary of macroeconomic conditions and it is closely monitored both by policy makers and by decision makers in the private sector. However, it is only available on a quarterly frequency, and in many countries it is released with a substantial delay. There are, however, many higher frequency and more timely economic and financial indicators that could be used for nowcasting and short‐term forecasting GDP. Against this backdrop, we propose a modification of the three‐pass regression filter to make it applicable to large mixed frequency data sets with ragged edges in a forecasting context. The resulting method, labelled MF‐3PRF, is very simple but compares well with alternative mixed frequency factor estimation procedures in terms of theoretical properties and actual GDP nowcasting and forecasting for the USA and a variety of other countries.
Development accounting literature usually attributes the observed cross-country variation in per capita income to dierences in countries' factor endowments and total factor productivity (the Solow residual). While the former can be relatively straightforward interpreted and measured, the latter remains at least partly a black box. In this paper, we provide a structural interpretation for dierences in total factor productivity across countries and quantitatively explore the role of trade barriers in explaining cross-country income dierences. In particular, we nd that giving all countries the same market entry costs or giving all country-pairs the same variable trade costs reduces inequality by around 13%.
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