Three essays on trade and development in the context of a changing international economic geography.

摘要

The world economy and the international trade system are undergoing considerable changes. This dissertation, which consists of a collection of three essays, will focus on two of these changes and their implications for the economic development prospects of poorer countries. For one, with the increasing international fragmentation of production, global trade is more and more organized within and shaped by international production networks and global value chains (GVCs). At the same time, integration of developing countries into such GVCs has advanced at a rapid pace through offshoring processes. In this context, economic development has increasingly become associated with (industrial or economic) "upgrading" within such GVCs. Yet, whether such economic upgrading also facilitates social progress is a question that has been explored much less. Looking at four sectors or value chains (horticulture, apparel, mobile telecommunications, and tourism) and applying a parsimonious approach to the measurement of upgrading to a sample of developing countries, the first two papers in this dissertation find that – while patterns differ across value chains – economic upgrading, in general, has been easier to achieve than social upgrading. This also implies that economic upgrading does not automatically translate into social improvements. However, evidence (particularly in the second paper which focuses on the global apparel value chain) suggests that economic upgrading is not a sufficient condition for, but seems to be conducive to social upgrading. A second feature of the changing global economic geography is that trade among developing countries is becoming ever more important – a trend which has been further fueled by the current global economic crisis. The third paper in this dissertation investigates how promising such South-South trade is as contributor to economic development. To this end, it estimates income elasticities of import demand in bilateral South-South trade flows and checks whether they exceed those observed in South-North trade. Combining the findings from this econometric exercise with evidence on the persistence of a "growth gap" between the North and the South, the paper suggests that promoting South-South commerce is a sensible way to make foreign trade a more promising and robust source of economic growth and development.