History, regionalism, and CARICOM trade: A gravity model analysis

The EU Response to COVID-19: From Reactive Policies to Strategic Decision-Making.

The objective of this study is to analyze the determinants of Brazilian exports by levels of technological intensity in the period 2000-2015. Gravity models were estimated for total of the exports and for each type of exports by levels of technological intensity, using the PPML-estimator. The study indicates that there is a process of concentration of Brazilian exports in low technology and medium-low technology products, at the same period in which China's share of total Brazilian shipments abroad grew. Estimates of empirical gravity models have shown that the income and size of the consumer market of Brazil’s trading partners seem to have the greatest positive influence on the Brazilian exports. Indications of this study are that the Brazil should continue to diversify its trading partners to minimize the impacts of a possible reduction of the economic growth of large trading partners (such as China and the US) on its exports and increase its exports of products with greater technological intensity. The results also highlight the need for Brazil to make greater efforts to increase its competitiveness in the international market to reduce the negative impacts of transport costs on the final prices of products exported by the country.

Comments on Assessment of the Trade Integration Pattern Between the Russian Federation and East/Southeast Asian Economies Using the Panel Gravity Framework

The purpose of this paper is to give a detailed insight into the digital and sustainable trade component of trade facilitation measures that the Western Balkan Countries can apply to enhance their mutual trade. The analysis in this paper is based on previous research conducted on a set of measures derived by the UN Global Survey on Digital and Sustainable Trade in 2023 (UN ESCAP, 2023). The UN Global Survey makes available five sets of around sixty trade facilitation measures grouped into transparency, formalities, institutional arrangements and cooperation, paperless trade, and cross-border paperless trade (UN, 2023). A gravity model in trade was applied and the results have shown that for improving trade among the Western Balkans countries the biggest importance and significance have the trade facilitation measures connected to transparency and formalities. The measures from the set: institutional arrangements and cooperation are also significant but with a negative sign. Also, significant but with a lower level (on a 10% significance) are the measures from cross-border paperless trade. The measures grouped in paperless trade have resulted in being insignificant in improving bilateral trade among the Western Balkans countries (Toshevska-Trpchevska et al., 2024). Our goal in this analysis would be to make an in-depth analysis of the reasons for the importance and significance of the specified trade facilitation measures. Additionally, we plan to make a sectoral analysis of the importance of digital and sustainable trade facilitation measures for improving bilateral trade among the Western Balkan countries. The results from the gravity model analysis have shown that digital and sustainable trade facilitation measures, especially measures on transparency and formalities are important for improving trade of the following groups of products: animal products, vegetable products, animal and vegetable bi-products, and foodstuffs; animal hides, wood products, paper goods, textiles, and footwear and headwear; machines, transportation, instruments, and weapons; and chemical products and plastics, and rubber. This sectoral analysis of the importance of trade facilitation measures confirms the sectoral structure of trade among these countries. We plan to make an in-depth analysis of the constraints and barriers that this sectoral group of products faces in bilateral trade. Western Balkans economies are all members of regional trade integration created by the revised central European Free Trade Agreement from 2006 (CEFTA 2006), including the Republic of 93 Findings The main findings of our analysis are connected to the in-depth analysis of the reasons for the significance of the measures of transparency and formalities and identifying the possible improvements in this sphere that could be done by the trade policy creators of Western Balkans countries. With our analysis, we plan to identify the bottlenecks that exist for improving the transparency of the trading procedures and harmonizing and facilitating the formalities in the trade among these countries. We also plan to identify the reasons for the significance but with negative signs of the measures connected to institutional arrangements and cooperation. Additionally, we plan to investigate the level of implementation of paperless trade measures in these countries as they appear to be insignificant for improving bilateral trade, but at the same time, these are the measures that can be directly identified as digital trade facilitation measures and present the important digital component for enabling sustainable trade nowadays (WTO,2023). Originality/value This analysis is a result of a collaboration that came out from a research grant funded by the Western Balkan FUND project titled "Digital and Sustainable Trade Facilitation in Western Balkans Countries" under protocol number PN: MO-4-024. For this analysis, five Western Balkan countries have been included: Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Kosovo was not included due to a lack of data in the UN Global Survey on Digital and Sustainable Trade Facilitation. The originality of this paper comes from the fact the digital and sustainable concept in international trade is a relatively new concept that derived and has been promoted by international organizations, like the United Nations Conference on Climate Change and the World Trade Organization in the last 2 years, after the Covid-19 Pandemic (UN, 2023; UN ESCAP, 2023). We believe that it is of utmost importance to investigate the possibility of applying digital and sustainable trade in the region of Western Balkans countries. That's why we think that this analysis is valuable. We will try to precisely identify the specific measures that could be undertaken in the field to harmonize the trading formalities and to improve the transparency in the trading procedures among these countries. We suppose that the findings from our research could be suitable as future solutions that can be applied by the trade policy creators. Taking into consideration that to our knowledge only the previously cited published paper deals with modeling the digital and sustainable component of bilateral trade between the Western Balkan countries, this analysis will provide original detailed findings on this issue. We believe that it is important to investigate the trade facilitation measures of Western Balkans countries because these countries have long been striving to become members of the European Union and continuously apply different trade tools, measures, and agreements to integrate and strengthen their position on the international trade scene (Mojsovska and Bjelic, 2022; Markovic et al., 2021).

The paper's relevance is substantiated by the fact that today a rapid growth of external debt of the most developed countries of the world (including European Union (EU) countries) is one of the most acute problems of the modern world economy and global finance. The paper aims to assess the degree of the external debt burden of various EU countries and evaluate the prospects of solving external debt problems in the EU. The article focuses on dynamics, composition, and specifics shaping the EU countries' external debt based on comparative, economic, statistical, and graphical analysis. Special attention we paid to the analysis of specifics of the EU countries' sovereign external debt composition connected with the acute problem of the rapid growth of public debt in general. The paper examines the ratio of public external and internal debt in various EU countries. It determines the EU particular countries where public external debt is shaping based on either cross-border or domestic model. The research results reveal a high degree of dependence of the EU economy on international debt finance. Gross external debt and sovereign external debt of the EU countries are still growing, and its distribution among various member states is very uneven. The structural imbalance of the EU countries' net external debt has also been revealed: the number of net borrowers is double that of net lenders. According to the basic external debt sustainability indicators, some EU countries are in a pretty tricky situation and entirely depend on the possibility of external debt refinancing.

The Continuous Importance of the Swiss Case for Europeanization Research

Despite the drive to reduce and eliminate tariff barriers between Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) member states, there has been a proliferation in non-tariff barriers (NTBs), which, according to research, are more harmful to trade than tariff barriers. The constituents of these barriers include, but are not limited to, lengthy documentation requirements, cumbersome customs procedures, unavailability of information, weak institutional quality, and so on. A combination of these has proliferated the ECOWAS trade corridor, resulting in the inability of the region to fulfil her intra-regional trade potentials and achieve her goals of increased bilateral trade within the region. This study utilizes the gravity model to examine the impact of administrative barriers on bilateral trade flows in the region. A dynamic gravity model was estimated for this study and the results obtained were mixed, such that various estimation techniques showed varying degrees of statistical significance for key independent variables. However, the Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimates showed that our independent variables are not statistically significant.

Taiwan and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) do not have any diplomatic ties, but they have enjoyed significantly economic benefits, especially bilateral investment and trade cooperation. Over the period 2000–2017, trade between Taiwan and ASEAN had significantly focused on manufactured goods embodied with high-skill and technology-intensive content. Using gravity model with a PPML (Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood) estimator, this article explores determinants of bilateral trade flows between them at both aggregate and sectoral levels. We found that economic scale and per capital income of ASEAN have much stronger effects than those of Taiwan at both aggregate trade and the degree of manufacturing. Results also show that bilateral trade between Taiwan and ASEAN has been efficiently performed over recent decades, except for cases of Myanmar and Cambodia. Hence, a dynamic approach should be taken by both sides to promote bilateral trade relations in future.

The European Union (EU) is one of the biggest traders of agricultural products. In 2017, extra-EU agricultural trade accounted for 7.4% of the total EU international trade. Furthermore, Europe is the main destination for agricultural goods arriving from African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) trading partners. The paper analyses the effect of geographical proximity, cultural similarity, free trade agreements on bilateral agricultural trade as well as intra-industry trade between EU member states and its trading partners (intra and extra EU trade), employing gravity model for a period of 1996–2017. Regression results suggest that EU countries export more agricultural products to their common markets. In addition, the export costs of agricultural products are lower if the EU and its external trading partners are culturally similar; have the same religion or both have regional trade agreements. We found a moderate intra-industry trade between the EU and ACP countries at 18%. The results indicate rather inter-industry trade between EU and non-EU members, with a lower index level for ACP countries. A higher positive impact is revealed on the agricultural import between ACP-EU countries than export.

We explore the effect of the non-economic factors in the safety of fishery products as well as economic and geological factors on fishery trade across countries, using the gravity model in this study. We focus on the effect of non-economic factors, especially, Seafood Traceability system, HACCP, and SPS agreements, which have not been considered in Korean studies using the gravity model. Our findings demonstrate the followings: First, for one trade pattern- fishery export-, Korean total fishery exports and each trading partner’s total fishery imports have a significant effect on Korean fishery exports to them. The proxy variable for distance across countries, transportation time, and companies with HACCP certification have a significant effect on Korea’s fishery exports to trading partners. Second, for the other trade pattern- fishery import-, trading partners’ total fishery exports and transportation time have positive effects on Korean fishery imports from them.

This paper attempts to identify the factors that affect Bangladesh's exports. The panel data estimation technique and a generalized gravity model have been used to analyze Bangladesh's export trade pattern. A theoretical justification for using the gravity model in the analysis of bilateral trade has been reaffirmed. The estimated results reveal that the main contributors to Bangladesh's exports are the exchange rate, partner countries' total import demand and the openness of the Bangladesh economy. All these factors affect the country's exports positively. Transportation costs have negative but insignificant effect on Bangladesh's exports. The country specific effects show that neighboring countries' influence on the Bangladesh's exports is more than the influence of other distant countries. Therefore, Bangladesh should reduce trade barriers, pursue competitive devaluation of its currency, improve product quality and increase product varieties.

Evidently, the quantum of the general and sectoral impacts of growing trends of Ghana- Nigeria bilateral trade has been a phenomenon of mixed feelings. To some analysts the relationship has been positive, to others it is challenging. The purpose of this research therefore, tries to evaluate the influencing factors of Nigeria-Ghana trade in merchandize products through the gravity model of trade from 2008-2019. The results showed that the real exchange rate had a small but significant positive impact on the bilateral trade between Ghana and Nigeria, but more importantly, it had a positive impact on the Nigerian economy. The study again discovered a positive correlation between the size of the economy between Ghana and Nigeria and the flow of bilateral trade. This shows that trade improves as the GDP between these two countries increases or decreases. The market size or population of both countries exhibited a strong positive impact on trade flows and this is consistent with the theoretical foundation. The study is unique because it is the first to exclusively study and empirically investigate the trend of Nigeria-Ghana bilateral trade relation through the Newtonian gravity model.

Using data over the period from 1950 to 2000, we estimate a model of bilateral international trade to explore the linkages between (a) alliances, (b) joint memberships in international institutions, (c) mutual cooperation and (d) conflict, (e) mutual economic freedom, and (f) democracy and bilateral trade. We incorporate exporter and importer effects as well as reciprocity into a gravity model and cross-validate it against annual out-of-sample data. The resulting, empirical findings show the importance of second and third-order dependencies in bilateral trade data. Military alliances, membership in IGOs, international cooperation, and mutual economic freedom are shown to be strongly associated with bilateral trade. Conversely, conflict and the level of democracy do not demonstrate strong, discernable linkages to bilateral trade.

The purpose of the study it to estimate the ex-post impact of the DCFTA on trade between Georgia and the European Union, as well as evaluate the welfare results of trade creation and trade diversion effects. Through the investigation of the existing literature, we can observe that little research has applied theoretical gravity model with inclusion of the trade creation and trade diversion variables on assessment of the impact of DCFTA in the model for 2014-2021 period. Significance of the study stems from the limitation identified in the literature and necessity to assess the opportunities created as a result of the DCFTA in Georgia. The paper applies a well-known structural gravity model. Evaluation is based on the panel dataset that includes bilateral trade flows of Georgia with European Union countries and main trade partners. We analyse data for 18 years, from 2004 to 2021. Final dataset contains 1440 observations. According to research results, the gravity model estimation showed that though positive, the impact of DCFTA on trade is not statistically significant. Research results suggest that due to the DCFTA, EU-Georgia trade increased approximately by 17% and the agreement has a trade creation effect.

Based on the use of trade integration index and gravity model, this paper uses the bilateral goods trade data between China and Australia from 2000 to 2019 to analyze the trade status, trade complementarity and trade potential between China and Australia. The results of the study show that the trade scale, trade complementarity and trade potential between China and Australia are constantly expanding. However, from the perspective of trade balance, China has always been in the position of a deficit country, and the deficit is getting larger and larger, especially in terms of primary products. Judging from the trade integration index, China’s trade integration with Australia generally shows an upward trend, indicating that the trade dependence between China and Australia is gradually increasing. Judging from the results of the trade potential analysis, the trade potential between the two countries has not been fully realized, and there is still much room for improvement in bilateral trade relations.