vertical specialisation and its determinants abstract vertical specialisation vs and outsourcing have gained prominence in international trade recently and could represent an entry point for developing countries into world markets as well as a channel for technology transfer however entry into international supply chains often requires just in time delivery and close to zero fault rates making market entry via vs difficult this paper analyses the importance of infrastructure and quality of institutions for vs for total trade and with a focus on the clothing and electronics sectors it is found that good governance and an open trade policy is strongly related to vs in electronics infrastructure particularly ports is strongly related to vs in the clothing sector

china as a final market the gabon timber and thai cassava value chains rapid economic growth in china has boosted its demand for commodities in many commodities sectors this has been associated with declining demand from high income northern economies this paper examines two hypotheses of the resulting outcomes for the organization of global value chains in general and for the role played by low income producers in particular the importance of standards in global value chains and the space available for low income producers to upgrade into higher value niches in their chains the detailed case studies of the thai cassava industry and the gabon timber sector both confirm these hypotheses

developing country exports of manufactures moving up the ladder to escape the fallacy of composition this paper tests for a fallacy of composition by analysing the demand for exports of the 18 developing countries that are most specialised in manufactures in the markets of the 10 largest industrial countries estimated export equations both time series and panel data suggest that most developing countries compete with other developing country exporters rather than with industrialised country producers a smaller number of countries that export more high technology products compete with industrialised country producers and also have higher expenditure elasticities for their exports thus the fallacy of composition applies mainly to the larger group of countries exporting mostly low technology products

the role of investment specific technological change in the business cycle this is a quantitative investigation of the importance of technological change speci c to new investment goods for postwar us aggregate uctuations a growth model that incorporates this form of technological change is calibrated to us data and simulated using the relative price of new equipment to identify the process driving investmentspeci c technology shocks the analysis suggests that this form of technological change is the source of about 30 of output uctuations 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

what separates us sources of resistance to globalization with increasing sophistication economists have been estimating gravity equations for five decades robust evidence shows that borders and distance impede trade by much more than tariffs or transports costs can explain we therefore advocate investigation of other sources of resistance despite the greater difficult involved in measuring and modelling them from our selective review of recent findings a unifying explanation emerges a legacy of historical isolation and conflict forged a world economy in which neither tastes nor information are homogeneously distributed cultural difference and inadequate information manifest themselves most strongly at national borders and over distance

convergence across canadian provinces 1961 to 1991 the purpose of this study is to provide a new look at the evolution of regional disparities in canada in the light of the recent convergence studies produced by european and american economists the degree of convergence of a variety of per capita income and output measures from 1961 to today is analysed the empirical analysis suggests that there is evidence of convergence in canada for different measurements of per capita income and output since the early 1960s during this period convergence has been helped by a favorable change in terms of trade and by government transfers and taxes our estimates of the convergence speed for canadian provinces are of the same magnitude as those found for regions within the same country and across countries in european and american studies

china s competitive performance a threat to east asian manufactured exports there is growing concern in southeast and east asia about the competitive threat posed by china s burgeoning exports exacerbated by its accession to the wto the threat is not confined to labourintensive products but spans the whole technological and skill range at the same time china is rapidly raising its imports from the region and it is not clear whether its burgeoning exports will damage its neighbours we examine the dimensions of china s competitive threat in the 1990s benchmarking competitive performance by technology and market and finds that market share losses are so far mainly in low technology products with japan being the most vulnerable market we analyse market share changes and highlight product groups that are directly or indirectly exposed to a competitive threat we examine intra regional trade and find that china and its neighbours are raising high technology exports in tandem the nature of the international production systems involved lead to complementari ty rather than confrontation china is thus acting as an engine of export growth for its neighbours in terms of direct trade however this will change as china moves up the value chain and takes on the activities that have driven east asian export growth

patterns of technological accumulation the comparative advantage and relative impact of asian emerging economies in low carbon energy technological systems abstract this paper highlights the specificities of the patterns of low carbon energy technological innovations in selected asian emerging economies china and the members of asean 4 thailand malaysia indonesia and the philippines are included in this analysis for their identical structure of developing economy we outline a synthetic framework to cluster together the technologies with similar characteristics and analyse the changes of these characteristics over time this is in order to elucidate the scope of sectoral composition and specialisation of the selected economies and thereby understand the relative impact of science based low carbon energy technologies on the niches of technological excellence the findings show that china was keen to pursue its diversification strategy and develop its capability in low carbon energy technologies since the turn of the millennium however china has been gradually losing its momentum in more traditional areas like biomass hydroelectric power natural gas and fossil fuels the asean 4 economies on the other hand are showing interest in building a number of niches of technological excellence this highlights a contrasting relative technological advantage between larger and smaller economies our findings also indicate that many of the low carbon technologies in selected economies have yet to attain strong scientific grounding for development the findings of this paper are expected to provide some insights into low carbon energy technological development of emerging economies and be useful for other developing economies to establish their strategic moves for energy technology development

convergence across the swedish counties 1911 1993 abstract this paper finds strong and robust evidence of convergence in per capita income across the twenty four swedish counties 1911 1993 in contrast to most previous studies on regional convergence this study adjusts incomes to account for regional differences in the cost of living the main conclusion is that using adjusted incomes as opposed to non adjusted incomes does not qualitatively change the results on convergence for the swedish counties however a quantitative difference is that estimated speeds of convergence are higher and the standard deviation of the log of per capita income is lower when adjusted incomes are used which is consistent with cross country evidence

changing trade patterns in major oecd countries disaggregated trade data are used to examine changing trade patterns for five developed economic regions the usa the european union australia canada and japan this study covers the 1980 1997 time period during which international trade for most goods faced less border protection changing trade patterns are found for the usa japan and the eu while persistent trade patterns are observed for australia and canada classifying goods into four groups trade patterns found in manufactured goods were the most dynamic and trade in bulk agricultural goods the most persistent

on the conservation of distance in international trade the volume of world trade has grown more than twice as fast as real world income since 1980 surprisingly the effect of distance on trade has increased during this period it could be that countries are trading greater volumes of goods that are highly sensitive to distance an alternative explanation is that distance has become more import for a significant share of goods using highly disaggregated bilateral trade data we find that adjustment in the composition of trade has not influenced the way in which distance affects trade in contrast for about 25 percent of industries distance has become more important this implies that the increased distance sensitivity of trade is a result of a change in relative trade costs that affects many industries as opposed to a shift to more distance sensitive products we also find that homogeneous products are twice as likely to have become more distance sensitive as compared with differentiated goods this is consistent with the hypothesis that falling search costs resulting from improvements in transport and communications are relatively more important for differentiated goods the results offer no evidence of the death of distance rather they suggest that distance related relative trade costs have remained unchanged or shifted in favor of proximate markets

competitiveness indices and developing countries an economic evaluation of the global competitiveness report developing countries policy makers worry about national competitiveness and closely watch indices ranking international competitive performance this paper analyzes from a development economics perspective if competitiveness is a legitimate concern and if the leading indices deserve the attention they get it assesses the best known index the global competitiveness report of the world economic forum and finds deficiencies at several levels its definitions are too broad the approach biased and the methodology flawed many qualitative measures are vague redundant or wrong these weak theoretical and empirical foundations reduce the value of the indices for analytical or policy purposes

intra and inter industry externalities from foreign direct investment in the mexican manufacturing sector new evidence from mexican regions summary this paper presents new empirical evidence on externalities from foreign direct investment fdi in several mexican regions in the early 1990s the main findings are threefold first the presence of fdi creates negative externalities within industries and positive externalities between industries through backward linkages second fdi externalities are stimulated by large technological differences between fdi and mexican firms and by geographic concentration of industries third we identify a substantial level of regional heterogeneity of the externality impact of fdi in line with the notion that fdi may have contributed to processes of changing regional prosperity under trade liberalization the findings also imply that maquiladora firms in the border states are generating positive externalities

the consumption based asset pricing model a note on potential tests and applications abstract breeden s demonstration that merton s multi beta capital asset pricing model can be collapsed into a single beta model where betas are computed with respect to aggregate consumption is an important theoretical advance nonetheless breeden s model retains many of the empirical problems that beset merton s earlier version in general the consumption betas will be nonstationary so that the state variables must be observable for the model to be estimated

an intertemporal general equilibrium model of asset prices this paper develops a continuous time general equilibrium model of a simple but complete economy and uses it to examine the behavior of asset prices in this model asset prices and their stochastic properties are determined endogenously one principal result is a partial differential equation which asset prices must satisfy the solution of this equation gives the equilibrium price of any asset in terms of the underlying real variables in the economy in this paper we develop a general equilibrium asset pricing model for use in applied research an important feature of the model is its integration of real and financial markets among other things the model endogenously determines the stochastic process followed by the equilibrium price of any financial asset and shows how this process depends on the underlying real variables the model is fully consistent with rational expectations and maximizing behavior on the part of all agents our framework is general enough to include many of the fundamental forces affecting asset markets yet it is tractable enough to be specialized easily to produce specific testable results furthermore the model can be extended in a number of straightforward ways consequently it is well suited to a wide variety of applications for example in a companion paper cox ingersoll and ross 7 we use the model to develop a theory of the term structure of interest rates many studies have been concerned with various aspects of asset pricing under uncertainty the most relevant to our work are the important papers on intertemporal asset pricing by merton 19 and lucas 16 working in a continuous time framework merton derives a relationship among the equilibrium expected rates of return on assets he shows that when investment opportunities are changing randomly over time this relationship will include effects which have no analogue in a static one period model lucas considers an economy with homogeneous individuals and a single consumption good which is produced by a number of processes the random output of these processes is exogenously determined and perishable assets are defined as claims to all or a part of the output of a process and the equilibrium determines the asset prices our theory draws on some elements of both of these papers like merton we formulate our model in continuous time and make full use of the analytical tractability that this affords the economic structure of our model is somewhat similar to that of lucas however we include both endogenous production and

specialization across varieties and north south competition analyzing a new database that makes it possible to disaggregate trade flows across many countries according to unit values we show that international specialization in terms of quality within industries and product categories plays an important role in the dynamics of north south competition the different specialization of countries at different levels of development within products and across varieties is mirrored in the recent shifts in world market shares which are very different across quality segments the south is not gaining market share in high value portions of trade pattern in this respect europe s specialization pattern appears to be different from that of the us and japan and may allow it to better resist the competitive pressure of the south lionel fontagne guillaume gaulier and soledad zignago

international trade without ces estimating translog gravity this paper derives a micro founded gravity equation in general equilibrium based on a translog demand system that allows for endogenous markups and substitution patterns across goods in contrast to standard ces based gravity equations trade is more sensitive to trade costs if the exporting country only provides a small share of the destination country s imports as a result trade costs have a heterogeneous impact across country pairs with some trade flows predicted to be zero i test the translog gravity equation and find strong empirical support in its favor

china india and the commodity boom economic and environmental implications for low income countries the international role of china has risen steadily for two decades and has become even more important in the current global recession the growing supply of labour intensive manufactured exports from china has been accompanied by a huge expansion in its imports both of raw materials and of skill intensive manufactured parts and components this offshoring of intermediates production by a large labour abundant economy has economic and environmental implications for other developing economies more recently the rapid expansion of the indian economy and trade indicates that it too will soon exert similar effects on global markets we sketch a model showing how the growth of these developing country giants generates adjustment pressures on other developing economies we discuss in particular how differences in relative factor endowments of resource rich economies can produce quite different outcomes in the context of product fragmentation and expanding commodity trade we also explore the effects on production trade environment and prospects for future growth in resource rich economies particularly in the context of weak institutions and other market failures we illustrate these different impacts by considering the cases of indonesia malaysia and thailand and highlight implications for growth development and policy

futures markets and commodity options hedging and optimality in incomplete markets abstract this paper examines the allocational roles of futures markets and commodity options in multi good and multi period economies in a continuous time model with time additive utilities and homogeneous beliefs trading in unconditional futures contracts the market portfolio and a riskless asset gives any pareto optimal allocation individuals optimal holdings of futures contracts in the continuous time model are related to their consumption bundles and to their risk tolerances it is shown that both hedging and reverse hedging behavior are possible in the general model with discrete trading options on portfolios of commodity options are shown to permit any unconstrained pareto optimal allocation

pricing capital assets in an international setting an introduction this paper shows how differences across countries of 1 inflation rates 2 consumption baskets of investors and 3 investment opportunity sets of investors matter when one applies capital asset pricing models in an international setting in particular the fact that countries differ is shown to affect the portfolio held by investors the equilibrium expected returns of risky assets and the financial policies of firms

trends and cycles in macroeconomic time series two structural time series models for annual observations are constructed in terms of trend cycle and irregular components the models are then estimated via the kalman filter using data on five u s macroeconomic time series the results provide some interesting insights into the dynamic structure of the series particularly with respect to cyclical behavior at the same time they illustrate the development of a model selection strategy for structural time series models

the rise of china and east asian export performance is the crowding out fear warranted this paper examines how china s emergence as a major trading nation is affecting export performance of its east asian neighbours following a stage setting overview of trends and patterns of china s export performance it probes china competition in third country markets and emerging patterns of imports the east asian export experience is examined in a wider global context against the backdrop of the ongoing process of global production sharing the findings indicate that the china threat has been vastly exaggerated in the contemporary policy debate china s rapid market penetration in traditional labour intensive manufactured goods has occurred mostly at the expense of the high wage east asian countries without crowding out the export opportunities of low wage countries in the region more importantly china s rapid integration into global production networks as a major assembly centre has created new opportunities for the other east asian countries to engage in various segments of the value chain in line with their comparative advantage

the impact of china on latin america and the caribbean summary the rapid growth of china and its increased integration with the global economy is having both direct and indirect effects on the latin american and caribbean region the paper focuses on the impacts of china on latin american trade and foreign direct investment flows it identifies the main channels through which china s growth is affecting the region and undertakes a preliminary analysis of the impacts on development it is shown that there are winners and losers in the region both at the country and sector level

measuring the competitive threat from china for other southern exporters abstractin recent years there has been a growing literature which analyses the threat which chinese exports pose to the exports of othe18 developing countries and compared with estimates for the standard measures it is shown that the latter tend to underestimat r developing countries this paper provides a critique of the standard measures of export similarity which have been used to ese the extent to which countries are threatened by china they also distort both the rankings of countries according to the extent to which they face competition from china and the direction of change in the competitive threat over time timate the threat from china in these studies two alternative indices the static and the dynamic index of competitive threat are developed and estimated for 1 introduction c hina s rapid growth and increased openness over the past quarter centuryhas led to it emerging as a key player in the global economy in the early 21stcentury gdp has grown at over 9 per cent per annum since 1980 so that chinais now the world s fourth largest economy at market exchange rates its share ofworld trade has risen over the same period from less than 1 per cent in 1980 toover 6 5 per cent in 2005 making it the third largest trading economy while some developing countries have bene ted from china s growingdemand for raw materials for others the growth of chinese exports has led togrowing concerns over the potential loss of export markets to cheap chinese goods these concerns are particularly acute for countries which developed signi canttextile and garment exports under the multi fibre arrangement mfa s quotasystem and which now face direct competition from china however theproblems are not con ned to countries that have specialised in unskilled labour intensive manufacturing as chinese industry becomes more technologicallysophisticated its range of exports is broadening and is also posing a threat tomiddle income exporters of more capital or skill intensive products such asmexico and malaysia chinese exports of some agricultural products are also onthe rise for example chinese apples affecting markets for countries such as chileand south africa

are output fluctuations transitory according to the conventional view of the business cycle fluctuations in output represent temporary deviations from trend the purpose of this paper is to question this conventional view if fluctuations in output are dominated by temporary deviations from the natural rate of output then an unexpected change in output today should not substantially change one s forecast of output in say five or ten years our examination of quarterly postwar united states data leads us to be skeptical about this implication the data suggest that an unexpected change in real gnp of 1 percent should change one s forecast by over 1 percent over a long horizon

unbalanced development the origin of korea s self employment problem from a comparative perspective abstract why does south korea have a demographically massive and economically vulnerable self employed population from a comparative perspective this study argues that korea s self employment problem originated in the country s process of unbalanced development korea benefited from the strategy of export led growth yet it did not manage the negative impact of this strategy on labour force absorption the consequence of unbalanced development is the limited capacity of labour markets to absorb the workforce therefore rural migrants in urban areas had no choice but to open small businesses despite having few financial and technological resources

the trade creating effects of business and social networks evidence from france using theory grounded estimations of trade flow equations this paper investigates the role that business and social networks play in shaping trade between french regions the bilateral intensity of networks is quantified using the financial structure and location of french firms and bilateral stocks of migrants compared to a situation without networks migrants are shown to double bilateral trade flows while networks of firms multiply trade flows by as much as four in some specifications finally taking network effects into account divides the estimation of the impact of transport costs and of the effect of administrative borders by around three

introduction the impact of asian drivers on the developing world the growth and export trajectories of china and india are not unique their significance arises from their size and the distinctive nature of their economic and political actors for this reason they are having an increasing impact on other economies including in the developing world this paper provides a framework for assessing these impacts distinguishing different vectors of interaction complementary and competitive impacts and direct and indirect impacts this sets the scene for the articles included in this special issue

growth empirics a panel data approach a comment this paper comments on recent developments in the literature on the econometric analysis of international growth and convergence it notes that panel estimates of the neoclassical model accommodating level effects for individual countries through heterogeneous intercepts deal with some of the econometric difficulties arising in some of the earlier cross sectional studies but it notes that in dynamic panels heterogeneity in growth effects and in speeds of convergence renders this estimator inconsistent also the pervasiveness of such heterogeneity is demonstrated in three samples of countries and the effects of incorrectly imposing homogeneity on estimated parameters are illustrated and discussed

effects of the preference for environmental quality on the export competition between china and oecd countries this study examines how importers preferences for environmentally friendly products influence the effect of china s export growth on the exports of oecd countries to third markets the effect of china s export growth is systematically investigated using the theoretical gravity model which assumes that importers environmental preferences are heterogeneous among countries a new measure is also proposed to represent importers revealed preferences for environmental quality across countries panel data consisting of observations for 30 oecd exporting countries and 60 importing countries over the 2000 10 period confirm that the crowding out effect of china s export growth on the exports of oecd countries observed in markets for consumption goods and the dampening effect observed in markets for intermediate goods are becoming weaker as the importer preference for environmental quality becomes stronger

a contribution to a multidimensional analysis of trade competition international trade grew substantially throughout the last decades and international relations became more important for the economic performance of the countries simultaneously new poles emerged in the international arena leading to growing competition for higher market shares therefore trade competition is a critical dimension of analysis for applied international trade studies we propose a conceptual framework for measuring this phenomenon by combining some critical previous contributions to build a multidimensional and more comprehensive concept which defines trade competition as a function of the degree of both structural similarity and total exports overlap moreover structural similarity should take into account three elements sectoral shares similarity inter sectoral similarity evaluating how different the distinct sectors are and intra sectoral similarity proximity in terms of quality ranges exported several measures are proposed to empirically capture the concept suggested finally we present an example including the exports of the three largest european economies to 122 destination markets in order to illustrate the application of the concept and the measures suggested this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

an intertemporal general equilibrium asset pricing model the case of diffusion information this paper provides sufficient conditions for the equilibrium price system and a vector of exogenously specified state variable processes to form a diffusion process in a pure exchange economy the conditions involve smoothness of agents utility functions and certain nice properties of the aggregate endowment process and the dividend processes of traded assets in place of the dynamic programming a martingale representation technique is utilized to characterize equilibrium portfolio policies this technique is useful even when there does not exist a finite dimensional markov structure in the economy and thus the markovian stochastic dynamic programming is not applicable a gents are shown to hold certain hedging mutual funds and the riskless asset in contrast to earlier results the market portfolio does not have a special role in hedging since the markets are dynamically complete when there exists a finite dimensional markov system in the economy the dimension of the hedging demand identified through the markovian dynamic programming may be much larger than that identified by the martingale method copyright 1987 by the econometric society

income convergence and divergence within and between ldc groups abstract we test in this study for per capita income convergence between 89 ldcs in africa asia and central and south america it is hypothesized that given the large pool of publicly available technological innovations the economies with the ability to adopt adapt these innovations will tend to have their per capita incomes converge over time our findings point to income convergence within a smaller subsample of 30 countries our findings also suggest that the factors that contributed to this ability include the relative size of government population growth and investment levels

how fast do economics converge the conventional approach to estimating how fast economics converge examines the cross economy relationship between the growth rate of per capita output over some time period and its initial level this approach produces consistent estimates only under highly restrictive assumptions which are violated by the data the paper develops an alternative approach that produces consistent estimates under weak assumptions this approach yields estimates substantially larger than those reported in the literature and also sufficiently large to be broadly consistent with the predictions of neoclassical growth theory

beyond the home market effect market size and specialization in a multi country world the standard two country model of international trade with monopolistic competition predicts a more than proportional relationship between a country s share of world production of a good and its share of world demand for that same good a result known as the home market effect we first show that this prediction does not generally carry through to the multi country case as production patterns are crucially affected by third country effects we then derive an alternative prediction that holds whatever the number of countries considered this new prediction takes into account important features of the real world such as comparative advantage due to cross country technological differences and lack of factor price equalization c 2009 elsevier b v all rights reserved

an intemporal model of asset prices in a markov economy with a limiting stationary distribution a testable single beta model of asset prices is presented if state variables have a long run stationary joint density function then the rate return on a very long term default free discount bond will be perfectly correlated with the representative investor s marginal utility of consumption thus the covariance of an asset s return with the return on such a bond will be an appropriate measure of the asset s riskiness the model can be therefore applied or tested even though the market portfolio or aggregate consumption may not be observable it also is shown that the expected rate of return on a very long term bond is equal to its variance this proposition can be tested to determine whether state variables follow stationary processes article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

interaction between knowledge and technology a contribution to the theory of development this article attempts to explain the large and persistent disparities in levels of output per worker across countries it is argued that an explanation for these disparities requires an understanding of the relationship between knowledge and technology the model that is constructed can be summarized as an open economy version of the solow swan growth model in which technological change is investment specific and knowledge about new technologies is embodied in labour in the model income differences arise because poor countries lack the knowledge to implement foreign technologies productively furthermore these disparities persist when countries differ in their ability to learn jel

using asset prices to measure the persistence of the marginal utility of wealth we derive a lower bound for the volatility of the permanent component of investors marginal utility of wealth or more generally asset pricing kernels the bound is based on return properties of long term zero coupon bonds risk free bonds and other risky securities we find the permanent component of the pricing kernel to be very volatile its volatility is about at least as large as the volatility of the stochastic discount factor a related measure for the transitory component suggest it to be considerably less important we also show that for many cases where the pricing kernel is a function of consumption innovations to consumption need to have permanent effects

where at home do exporters produce and export foreign growth can induce changes in production structures across domestic regions through international trade with a two country model with the explicit incorporation of two regions in the home country we show that effects of foreign growth on exports and production to be possibly asymmetric among home regions this foreign growth effect is especially prominent in asia with china emerging as the largest trading country we empirically test our theoretical hypothesis with the data set of japanese regions we find evidence that the growth of asian countries leads to a change in the regional structure of exports and production in japan with respect to an adjacent asian country the growth of a foreign country exerts opposite effects on production among japanese regions

long run implications of investment specific technological change an attempt is made to disentangle its effects from the more traditional hicksneutral form of technological progress the balanced growth path for the model is characterized and calibrated to u s national income and product account nipa data the quantitative analysis suggests that investment specific technological change accounts for the major part of growth jel e13 030 041 047

the cyclical component of u s economic activity quarterly data on industrial production and deflated gross national product in the united states from 1947 through 1985 are decomposed into independent nonstationary trend and stationary cycle components using kalman filtering and smoothing techniques estimates of the model parameters imply that at least half of the quarterly innovation in u s economic activity can be attributed to a stationary cyclical component that persists over periods of time as long as five years this finding is inconsistent with the hypothesis that most of the apparent variation in u s economic activity can be attributed to a nonstationary trend component

measuring the impact of china s export growth on its asian neighbours the rise of china as an economic power has led to concern in many countries especially among asian countries that this development poses a serious threat to their own economic performance and in particular their ability to export the empirical support for this view remains inconsistent however with mixed evidence for the view that chinese exports has harmed or helped exports by other asian economies and which countries are more or less affected one explanation for these inconsistencies might include the various biases that follow from the use of a gravity model that is specified in an a theoretical manner in this paper we study the effect of the chinese exports growth on those by other asian countries using the empirical framework outlined by baldwin and taglioni 2006 the disadvantage of this approach is that we capture the relative effect rather than its direction that is when using the theoretically robust gravity model we are able to identify which countries are more or less harmed by chinese exports and not whether the effect is positive or negative to identify that we use instead trade on parts and components and final goods taken together we evidence of a positive relation between chinese and its asian neighbours exports with countries with greater endowments of human capital and capital labour ratio benefiting most from this growth

changing trade structure and its implications for growth there is a long tradition in the development literature that what a country exports matters for its growth prospects recent work has refocused on this issue by attempting to produce numerical scores for different types of product to identify the complexity or sophistication of a country s export basket based on the insight that the type of product an economy exports can have important implications for its economic performance and that goods exported predominantly by rich countries will have different characteristics from those exported by poor countries lall et al 2006 put forward a means of classifying commodities based on the income levels of a product s main exporters at around the same time hausmann et al 2006 following a similar approach put forward a slightly different form of product classification and rodrik 2006 applied this specifically to an analysis of china this paper highlights the difference between the approaches and its implications for the analysis of china which appears less special using the approach of lall et al it argues that the classification of products at a disaggregate level is a helpful starting point for assessing issues of trade competitiveness and that further work using either or both forms of classification is justified

a test of the conditional convergence hypothesis econometric evidence from african countries abstract using a new measure of human capital and following the neoclassical framework suggested by mankiw et al 1992 mankiw n romer d weil d 1992 a contribution to the empirics of economic growth quarterly journal of economics 107 407 437 this paper presents robust econometric evidence of conditional convergence among african countries over the period 1960 1985 the implied results indicate higher rates of return to physical and human capital and a low speed of convergence in these countries the observed low speed of convergence in transitional dynamics in african countries can possibly be attributed to many structural factors including the prevailing political and economic institutions

revisiting the revisited terms of trade will china make a difference in challenging the conventional wisdom at the time singer and prebisch posited a number of explanations for declining terms of trade of developing economies including both country and product specific factors over the past decade we have begun to witness a simultaneous process of price differentiation within commodities with the prices of some commodities increasing and within manufacturing with the price of many manufactures falling these price changes may reverse the decline in the terms of trade of commodity producers the entry of china into the global market has played an important role in this augmenting the demand for many hard commodities its role as an exporter of manufactures coupled with concentration in global buying may undermine the prices of many manufactures