F14 - Empirical Studies of Trade
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The Impact of a Trade War: Assessment of the Current Tariffs and Alternative Scenarios
This note uses Charbonneau and Landry’s (2018) framework to assess the direct impact of the current trade tensions on the Canadian and global economies, as well as possible implications if the conflict escalates further. Overall, my findings show that the estimated impact of current tariffs on real gross domestic product (GDP) remains relatively small, which is in line with the literature on gains from trade, but the impact on trade is much larger. -
The Trade War in Numbers
We build upon new developments in the international trade literature to isolate and quantify the long-run economic impacts of tariff changes on the United States and the global economy. -
Market Size and Entry in International Trade: Product Versus Firm Fixed Costs
This paper develops a theoretical framework to infer the nature of fixed costs from the relationship between entry patterns in international markets and destination market size. If fixed costs are at the firm level, firms take advantage of an intrafirm spillover by expanding firm-level product range (scope). -
Estimating the Impacts of Tariff Changes: Two Illustrative Scenarios
We build upon new developments in the international trade literature to construct a quantitative Ricardian framework similar to Caliendo and Parro (2015) to isolate and estimate the long-run economic impacts of tariff changes. -
Responding to the First Era of Globalization: Canadian Trade Policy, 1870–1913
In this paper we document Canada’s trade policy response to late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century globalization. We link newly digitized annual product-specific data on the value of Canadian imports and duties paid from 1870–1913 to establishment-specific production and location information drawn from the manuscripts of the 1871 industrial census. -
Weakness in Non-Commodity Exports: Demand versus Supply Factors
We use the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model (ToTEM) to conduct demand- and supply-driven simulations, both of which deliver weakness in Canadian non-commodity exports relative to foreign activity in line with recent data. -
Decomposing Canada’s Market Shares: An Update
Building on the shift-share analysis of Barnett and Charbonneau (2015), this note decomposes Canada’s market shares in the United States, Europe and China for imports of non-energy goods into competitiveness, preference shifts and an interaction term. We find that, despite the depreciation of the dollar, Canada continued to lose market share over 2014–17 (around 0.4 percentage points lost per year on average over four years). -
What Is Restraining Non-Energy Export Growth?
This note summarizes the key findings from Bank of Canada staff analytical work examining the reasons for the recent weakness in Canadian non-energy exports. Canada steadily lost market share in US non-energy imports between 2002 and 2017, mostly reflecting continued and broad-based competitiveness losses. -
Product Sophistication and the Slowdown in Chinese Export Growth
Chinese real export growth decelerated considerably during the last decade. This paper argues that the slowdown largely resulted from China moving to a more sophisticated mix of exports: China produced more sophisticated goods over which it had pricing power instead of producing greater volumes of less sophisticated products. -
The Causal Impact of Migration on US Trade: Evidence from Political Refugees
Immigrants can increase international trade by shifting preferences towards the goods of their country of origin and by reducing bilateral transaction costs. Using geographical variation across U.S. states for the period 2008 to 2013, I estimate the respective causal impact of immigrants on U.S. exports and imports.