No Arabic abstract
During the last decades two important contributions have reshaped our understanding of international trade. First, countries trade more with those with whom they share history, language, and culture, suggesting that trade is limited by information frictions. Second, countries are more likely to start exporting products that are similar to their current exports, suggesting that knowledge diffusion among related industries is a key constrain shaping the diversification of exports. But does knowledge about how to export to a destination also diffuses among related products and geographic neighbors? Do countries need to learn how to trade each product to each destination? Here, we use bilateral trade data from 2000 to 2015 to show that countries are more likely to increase their exports of a product to a destination when: (i) they export related products to it, (ii) they export the same product to the neighbor of a destination, (iii) they have neighbors who export the same product to that destination. Then, we explore the magnitude of these effects for new, nascent, and experienced exporters, (exporters with and without comparative advantage in a product) and also for groups of products with different level of technological sophistication. We find that the effects of product and geographic relatedness are stronger for new exporters, and also, that the effect of product relatedness is stronger for more technologically sophisticated products. These findings support the idea that international trade is shaped by information frictions that are reduced in the presence of related products and experienced geographic neighbors.
Inside the EU, the commercial integration of the CEE countries has gained remarkable momentum before the crisis appearance, but it has slightly slowed down afterwards. Consequently, the interest in identifying the factors supporting the commercial integration process is high. Recent findings in the new trade theory suggest that FDI influence the trade intensity but the studies approaching this relationship for the CEE countries present mixed evidence, and investigate the commercial integration of CEE countries with the old EU members. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to assess the CEE countries intra-integration, focusing on the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and the Slovak Republic. For each country we employ a panel gravitational model for the bilateral trade and FDI, considering its interactions with the other three countries in the sample on the one hand, and with the three EU main commercial partners on the other hand. We investigate different facets of the trade -- FDI nexus, resorting to a fixed effects model, a random effects model, as well as to an instrumental variable estimator, over the period 2000-2013. Our results suggest that outward FDI sustains the CEE countries commercial integration, while inward FDI has no significant effect. In all the cases a complementarity effect between trade and FDI is documented, which is stronger for the CEE countries historical trade partners. Consequently, these findings show that CEE countries policymakers are interested in encouraging the outward FDI toward their neighbour countries in order to increase the commercial integration.
We characterise the set of dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC), strongly budget balanced (SBB), and ex-post individually rational (IR) mechanisms for the multi-unit bilateral trade setting. In such a setting there is a single buyer and a single seller who holds a finite number k of identical items. The mechanism has to decide how many units of the item are transferred from the seller to the buyer and how much money is transferred from the buyer to the seller. We consider two classes of valuation functions for the buyer and seller: Valuations that are increasing in the number of units in possession, and the more specific class of valuations that are increasing and submodular. Furthermore, we present some approximation results about the performance of certain such mechanisms, in terms of social welfare: For increasing submodular valuation functions, we show the existence of a deterministic 2-approximation mechanism and a randomised e/(1-e) approximation mechanism, matching the best known bounds for the single-item setting.
We measure elasticity of substitution between foreign and domestic commodities by two-point calibration such that the Armington aggregator can replicate the two temporally distant observations of market shares and prices. Along with the sectoral multifactor CES elasticities which we estimate by regression using a set of disaggregated linked input--output observations, we integrate domestic production of two countries, namely, Japan and the Republic of Korea, with bilateral trade models and construct a bilateral general equilibrium model. Finally, we make an assessment of a tariff elimination scheme between the two countries.
We define a model of interactive communication where two agents with private types can exchange information before a game is played. The model contains Bayesian persuasion as a special case of a one-round communication protocol. We define message complexity corresponding to the minimum number of interactive rounds necessary to achieve the best possible outcome. Our main result is that for bilateral trade, agents dont stop talking until they reach an efficient outcome: Either agents achieve an efficient allocation in finitely many rounds of communication; or the optimal communication protocol has infinite number of rounds. We show an important class of bilateral trade settings where efficient allocation is achievable with a small number of rounds of communication.
Bilateral trade, a fundamental topic in economics, models the problem of intermediating between two strategic agents, a seller and a buyer, willing to trade a good for which they hold private valuations. Despite the simplicity of this problem, a classical result by Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) affirms the impossibility of designing a mechanism which is simultaneously efficient, incentive compatible, individually rational, and budget balanced. This impossibility result fostered an intense investigation of meaningful trade-offs between these desired properties. Much work has focused on approximately efficient fixed-price mechanisms, i.e., Blumrosen and Dobzinski (2014; 2016), Colini-Baldeschi et al. (2016), which have been shown to fully characterize strong budget balanced and ex-post individually rational direct revelation mechanisms. All these results, however, either assume some knowledge on the priors of the seller/buyer valuations, or a black box access to some samples of the distributions, as in D{u}tting et al. (2021). In this paper, we cast for the first time the bilateral trade problem in a regret minimization framework over rounds of seller/buyer interactions, with no prior knowledge on the private seller/buyer valuations. Our main contribution is a complete characterization of the regret regimes for fixed-price mechanisms with different models of feedback and private valuations, using as benchmark the best fixed price in hindsight. More precisely, we prove the following bounds on the regret: $bullet$ $widetilde{Theta}(sqrt{T})$ for full-feedback (i.e., direct revelation mechanisms); $bullet$ $widetilde{Theta}(T^{2/3})$ for realistic feedback (i.e., posted-price mechanisms) and independent seller/buyer valuations with bounded densities; $bullet$ $Theta(T)$ for realistic feedback and seller/buyer valuations with bounded densities; $bullet$ $Theta(T)$ for realistic feedback and independent seller/buyer valuations; $bullet$ $Theta(T)$ for the adversarial setting.