Development Aid and Export Resilience in Developing Countries: A Reference to Aid for Trade

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, as with previous major crises, such as the 2008 financial crisis, has had a severe negative impact on international trade flows. The present paper aims to contribute to the debate concerning how to foster resilience against future crises, in terms of countries’ aggregate exports, by examining the effect of development aid (i.e., so-called official development assistance), particularly the impact of the Aid for Trade (AfT) component, upon export resilience. The resilience of exports refers to the ability of countries’ aggregate exports to resist shocks, regardless of whether they are environmental or external shocks. The core argument of the analysis is that development aid would affect export resilience through its impact upon productive capacities. The analysis covers 93 developing countries over the period 2002–2018. The findings indicate that the total development aid flows, including both AfT flows and NonAfT flows, exert a positive effect upon export resilience. Among AfT components, AfT for productive capacities appears to exert a greater positive effect upon export resilience than AfT for economic infrastructure and AfT for trade policy and regulation. In addition, development aid (regardless of which aid variable is considered) exerts the greatest positive effect upon export resilience in countries (such as the least developed countries—LDCs) that have the lowest productive capacities. These findings highlight the need for donor countries to supply higher development aid flows, in particular, AfT flows, to countries such as LDCs that have low productive capacities.

Impact of Environmental Regulation on Export Technological Complexity of High-Tech Industries in Chinese Manufacturing

“…Major Findings (Fuadah et al 2022;Gnangnon 2022;Huang et al 2022) Explanations of the term "regulation" (Oginni and Omojowo 2016;Phuoc 2022;Santos 2023) Regulation as a concrete institutional arrangement from an economic perspective (Manatovna et al 2023;Oginni and Omojowo 2016) Government regulations aimed at achieving economic growth (Nõmmela and Kõrbe Kaare 2022;Novitasari and Tarigan 2022;Sapta et al 2021) Environmental regulation is a force aimed at constraining entities responsible for pollution (Blundell et al 2020;Jin et al 2019;Naime 2017) Environmental regulation effectively controls the generation of new pollution (Novitasari and Tarigan 2022;Oginni and Omojowo 2016) The government is responsible for formulating the specific implementation details of environmental regulation policies and ensuring their effective implementation (Blundell et al 2020;Borenstein et al 2019) Strengthening environmental constraints would increase the cost of pollution control for enterprises, imposing a greater burden on production (Bigerna et al 2019;Kee and Tang 2016;Reynaert 2021) The implementation of environmental regulation inhibits export trade in EU countries (Graham and Wada 2002;Malecki 2003;Yang et al 2022a) Investigating the relationship between environmental regulation and China's export trade (Alexander and Schwandt 2022;Assunção et al 2023;Barrage 2020;Iverson and Karp 2021;Reynaert 2021) The implementation of environmental regulation policies has a positive impact on economic development (Aversa and Guillotin 2018;Mbanyele and Wang 2022;Saqib et al 2023;Ullah et al 2023;Xu 2023) The implementa...…”

“…The term "regulation" refers to the government's establishment or enactment of rules to constrain the behavior of certain entities to achieve specific goals (Fuadah et al 2022;Gnangnon 2022;Huang et al 2022). From an economic perspective, regulation, as a concrete institutional arrangement, represents the management or constraint imposed by the government on economic activities.…”

“…These industries are key to achieving breakthrough development in manufacturing, significantly enhancing the international competitiveness of the sector. Despite the gradual increase in the proportion of high-tech industry exports within the entire manufacturing industry, their technological level requires further improvement (Gnangnon 2022;Tsurumi et al 2015).…”

Road of the least developed countries to sustainable development: Assessing trade participation in the context of the sustainable development goals

“…All data relating to indicators were drawn from UNCTADstat, the sta- Progress in the trade performance of LDCs was assessed using 10 criteria in the form of different indicators expressing the level and structure of trade of countries (see Table 3). These indicators are commonly used, although separately, in trade analyzes and trade reports of international organizations (UNCTAD, 2020a; World Trade Organization, 2012) and empirical trade literature (Fojtíková & Staníčková, 2017, Gnangnon, 2022, Mendez et al, 2007, Verter, 2017. The criteria enable a comprehensive assessment of the countries' trade participation in each year and the progress they have made over the years in engaging in international trade.…”

Gender matters: board gender diversity and firms’ export resilience

“…Firstly, it enriches the literature on factors influencing firms' export resilience through corporate governance. While researchers have explored the impact of macroeconomic factors such as development aid (Gnangnon 2022), trade policies (Calı et al 2022), and export tax rebates (Xu and Liu 2023) on export resilience, as well as, the roles of export diversity (Esposito 2022) and the enhancement of the quality of export products (Wang and Wei 2021) have been examined from a micro perspective. However, there has been limited research from the perspective of corporate governance.…”