Exports and International Logistics

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. Policy Research Working Paper 5691Do better international logistics reduce trade costs, raising a developing country's exports? Yes, but the magnitude of the effect depends on the country's size. The authors apply a gravity model that accounts for firm heterogeneity and multilateral resistance to a comprehensive new international logistics index. A onestandard deviation improvement in logistics is equivalent to a 14 percent reduction in distance. An average-sized This paper is a product of the Trade and Integration Team, Development Research Group. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The author may be contacted at abehar@imf.org.developing country would raise exports by about 36 percent. Most countries are much smaller than average however, so the typical effect is 8 percent. This difference is chiefly due to multilateral resistance: it is bilateral trade costs relative to multilateral trade costs that matter for bilateral exports, and multilateral resistance is more important for small countries.

The Green Logistics Impact on International Trade: Evidence from Developed and Developing Countries

“…The LPI of importing countries has a positive significant impact on the export volume of foreign exporters. These results are consistent with previous studies [4,5,[33][34][35]. In addition, the LPI coefficient of exporting countries is higher than that of importing countries, indicating that the impact of LPI on the international trade of exporting countries is bigger than that for importing countries.…”

“…Behar and Manner [33] analyzed the relationship between the logistics performance of importing, exporting countries, and bilateral exports. They found that the logistics performance of exporting countries has a significant positive impact on export volume.…”

Investing across Borders with Heterogeneous Firms: Do FDI-Specific Regulations Matter?

“…This is a positive function ofp and an estimate of the latent variable Z ij . As Behar et al (2009a) explain, attaching a Pareto distribution to rm productivity maps to a consistent estimate of the number of rms protable enough to invest abroad. The second stage includes controls for rm selection ln(e δẑij − 1) and country selection ( η ij ).…”

Export Performance and Trade Facilitation Reform: Hard and Soft Infrastructure

“…Third, we follow Freund and Rocha (2010) and restrict exports to new products to deal with reverse causality of exports to trade facilitation, as trade in new goods cannot affect investment in 'hard infrastructure' or institutional reform. To take into account omitted multilateral resistance effects, we follow the procedure originally proposed by Baier and Bergstrand (2009) for one-stage gravity estimates, and extended by Behar et al (2009) to a twostage sample selection model, which consists of correcting bilateral variables. Our results suggest that trade facilitation reforms could improve the export performance of developing countries at the extensive and intensive margin, especially investment in physical infrastructure and regulatory reform to improve the business environment.…”