Measuring Subnational Trade Competitiveness

Abstract

Much research has tried to measure the competitiveness of territorial units such as countries and subnational regions. We propose new measures of subnational trade competitiveness that reflect the economic focus of regions on their country’s comparative advantage. Our approach starts with data on the revealed comparative advantage of countries at the industry level. We then combine these measures with data on the employment structure of subnational regions to arrive at measures of subnational trade competitiveness. In total, we offer data for 6,475 regions across 63 countries and over a time period of 21 years. In this article, we introduce our measures and provide descriptive evidence, include two case studies for Bolivia and South Korea, that shows the plausibility of these measures. These data are relevant for many areas of research, including on the competitiveness of territorial units, the economic and political impact of trade on importing countries, and the economic and political consequences of globalization.

Trade Competitiveness, Constituency Interests, and Legislators' Attitudes Towards Trade Agreements

“…the key finding that legislators' trade policy stances reflect constituents' economic interests is in line with a considerable number of existing studies (Bailey, goldstein, and Weingast 1997;Campello and urdinez 2021;Feigenbaum and Hall 2015;gartzke and Wrighton 1998;Hanretty, Lauderdale, and vivyan 2017;Hiscox 2002;Miler and allee 2018;Milner and tingley 2011;Murillo and Pinto 2021;Owen 2017;rickard 2015;schonhardt-Bailey 2003;stiller 2023). the article still makes a series of important contributions to this literature.…”

“…to measure subnational trade competitiveness, following the approach outlined in detail in Huber, stiller and dür (2023), we first calculate a country's comparative advantage at the industry group level. For this, we rely on two measures: (1) revealed comparative advantage (rCa) and ( 2) exports-over-imports (eX/iM) (for more detail, see section C in the online supporting information).…”

Evaluation and impact factors of international competitiveness of China’s cobalt industry from the perspective of trade networks

“…Currently, assessments of industries' international competitiveness can be divided into two main approaches. The first approach involves the use of a single indicator, such as the international market share indicator (IMS), the revealed comparative advantage indicator (RCA), the net revealed comparative advantage indicator (NRCA), the trade competition indicator (TC), productivity, market share, and profitability, among others, to measure the international competitiveness of industries 17 – 19 . The second method involves utilizing a range of indicators to establish a comprehensive evaluation index system for assessing the international competitiveness of industries 20 , 21 .…”

Evaluation and impact factors of cobalt resource industrial international competitiveness: A perspective based on trade networks

“…Currently, assessments of industries' international competitiveness can be divided into two main approaches. The rst approach involves the use of a single indicator, such as the international market share indicator (IMS), the revealed comparative advantage indicator (RCA), the net revealed comparative advantage indicator (NRCA), the trade competition indicator (TC), productivity, market share, and pro tability, among others, to measure the international competitiveness of industries [17][18][19] . The second method involves utilizing a range of indicators to establish a comprehensive evaluation index system for assessing the international competitiveness of industries 20,21 .…”

“…The speci c outcomes are presented in Table 5. The regression ndings of models ( 13)- (17) demonstrate that the panel quantile regression method is used to analyze the factors that in uence the international competitiveness of sectors with varying conditional distributions. As a country's cobalt resources industry transitions from the lower to the upper echelons of the conditional distribution in terms of international competitiveness, the in uence of the country's trade network characteristics on the industry's global competitiveness undergoes distinct changes.…”