F14 - Empirical Studies of TradeReturn

This study accounts for the nexus between financial development and intra-trade relationships using nine Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) countries with the extraction of data from secondary sources spanning between 1990 and 2021. The following are the con- clusions drawn from the study: exchange rate, interest rate and inflation rate, which are criti- cal macroeconomic variables, represent unfavourable factors that suppress the intra-trade rela- tionships within the RCEP region. In light of the above, this study recommends that any time the policymakers in RCEP countries desire better intra-trade relationships within RCEP countries, they should implement a unified monetary policy that will stimulate interest rate, exchange rate and inflation rate in such a way that the intra-trade relationships will be enhanced among the RCEP countries.

Czechia is one of the most export-oriented countries, reaching high levels of economic complexity. However, its innovative capabilities remain limited. Taking these factors into consideration, we determined the country's optimal diversification path by identifying prospective export sectors which would enhance the country's competitiveness. We combine the product space and proximity methodologies on predicted export data together with a company-level analysis. We identified machinery for specialized industries and parts thereof (SITC 7284), machine-tools for specialized industries parts or accessories (SITC 7281) and power hand tools, pneumatic or non-electric, and parts thereof (SITC 7541) as the most prospective categories in terms of high complexity, expected trade volume growth, proximity to Czechia's existing production capabilities and manufacturing base operated by large, highly innovative Czech-owned firms.

Motivated by the persistent rise in bilateral trade imbalance in Nigeria, this paper empirically examines whether Nigeria's four trading partners (China, India, the UK and the US) respond asymmetrically to changes in the oil price and exchange rate using a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model over the period from January 1999 to December 2019. Interestingly, we find that oil price increase and decrease influence Nigeria's trade balance with four trading partners asymmetrically. Further evidence indicates that oil price increases predominantly exert greater influence than decreases. Furthermore, Nigeria's trade balances with India and the UK in the long run and the US in the short run significantly respond asymmetrically to changes in exchange rate. In addition the result establishes significant evidence of the J-curve pattern in the response of Nigeria's trade balance with the UK to differences in exchange rate.

This paper investigates whether inflows of FDI and innovative activities act as a channel of knowledge spillovers in improving quality of countries' output. In measuring export quality, sophistication of a country's export basket is utilized. Utilizing panel data of countries for the period 2002-2015 and applying GMM methodology, the results indicate that the level of financial development, the quality of human capital and globalization of a country have a determinant role on the relation between knowledge spillover channels and the quality of exports. Patent applications generally positively affect sophistication of exports. FDI serves as a channel for knowledge spillovers to benefit the sophistication level of exports only for developed, more educated, financially developed and globalized countries.

Observing the expanding and high share of export of travel services in both GDP and total export of services in Mediterranean countries, we focus our research on travel service export in twelve countries from 1998 to 2018. We investigated both short-term and long-term significance of export of travel services for GDP growth in Mediterranean countries using the VAR and VECM model and the fixed-effects panel OLS model. In our analysis of significance of export of travel services on current account balance, we applied an accounting approach. Our application of the fixed-effects OLS model on the panel data with GDP growth rate as the dependent variable has shown that, in the short run, export of travel services has a positive impact on GDP growth. In the long run, Granger causality based on block exogeneity Wald tests evidenced that export of travel services has a positive impact on GDP growth, but only at the 10% significance level. Following the accounting approach in our analysis of impact of export of travel services on overall current account balance, we evidenced a strong relevance of export of travel services in achieving current account balance equilibrium.

We use a gravity model that accounts for multilateral resistance terms (MRT) to examine the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on a country's export. Empirical analysis based on data from 20 countries that traded with one another (creating 380 pairs of importing-exporting countries) over the period 2002-2016 shows that the export of a country is negatively associated with the EPU of its corresponding importing country, but not with the EPU of the exporting country itself. This effect remains qualitatively unchanged regardless whether the exporting country is a developed or a developing economy and whether it focuses on commodities or non-commodities, but the effect is smaller for commodity exporters. Furthermore, the observed negative effect is more pronounced when the unemployment rate in the importing country is high, whilst GDP growth in the importing country does not influence the focal relationship. These findings advance the literature by highlighting the importance of accounting for the differential effects of policy uncertainty in importing and exporting countries and of taking into consideration country and product heterogeneity when analysing the effects of EPU on exports.

In its drive to achieve a high-income country status, Malaysia aspires to attract more private investment into the services sector. However, empirical studies on the determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI), especially in the services sector, are sparse, even more so at the industry level. The location theory asserts that FDI inflows into a host country are determined by variables related to resources, infrastructure, market conditions, cost and business environment. This paper investigates the validity of the location theory on Malaysia using a set of panel data for eight services industries from 2003 to 2010. We find that at the industry level, market size, ICT infrastructure and human capital have significantly influenced FDI inflows into the services sector. However, the impact of FDI liberalisation is not significant compared to the dynamic changes of the other variables as progress in FDI liberalization is slow and limited.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the trade integration process of the Visegrad countries from a special point of view, namely by estimating border effects in the countries. The regressional analysis run with two different estimators (OLS vs. PPML) on two different model specifications suggests that between 1995 and 2011 the V4 countries were integrating continuously into the Single Market of the European Union. The results also show that the size of border effect is fairly sensitive to the estimator and particularly to the specification chosen by the researcher. According to the country-level estimation, Hungary seems to be the most integrated country getting the lowest home bias parameters followed by the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, respectively.

The main objective of this paper is to find the determinants of the international competitiveness of the manufacturing sectors of the Czech economy, using the database of 13 manufacturing sub-sectors in 1995-2011, with the aid of ECM model. The authors research the question of how much foreign and domestic demand, the level of labour costs, the level of sector innovation intensity, the level of sector openness to foreign markets as well as sectoral labour productivity influence the changes in their trade balance. The results of the analysis conducted show substantial differences in the roles particular variables play in explaining the net exports in individual sectors. The results of the analysis indicate mostly a greater impact of the researched factors on net exports in long rather than short term.

The paper aims to investigate the impact of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) and common commercial policy (CCP) on export performances of Visegrad group of countries (The Visegrad Four, V-4: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary) preceding and following the EU accession. The V-4, before becoming the EU members, have participated actively in regionalism, signing free trade agreements and customs unions which often also resulted in the extended economic integration. But since the EU accession in 2004, all RTAs of the new members were no longer valid as these countries became the parties of the CCP of the EU. To analyse whether CCP was beneficial on the export performances of the V-4 countries, we estimate the augmented gravity model by employing Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood (PPML) estimator for time periods before and after the EU accession, in 1999-2003 and 2004-2013, respectively.

The present paper is focussed on the impact of introducing the common European currency on export performance. Our objective is to explore the impact of introducing the common European currency on the export performance of Slovakia in comparison to the Czech Republic and the old EU member states. Our findings suggest that the export performance and other export-related indicators evolved largely in parallel in both countries. Positive trade effects brought about by the introduction of the euro are rather moderate - up to 5%. The results to some extent do confirm the existence of the so called "Rose effect" - the effect that two countries sharing the same currency trade more than they would otherwise.

The main objective of this article is to test the existence of Stolper-Samuelson theorem between Turkey and EU-15 countries for the period 2005-2014. According to the results, a significant relationship is found between exports and real wages especially in the labour and raw intensive sectors of Turkish exports, where Turkey is relatively labour and raw abundant in comparison with the EU-15. Test results indicate a long-run relationship between exports of manufacture of wearing apparel, food, textiles and real wages, a unidirectional Granger causality relationship is found from exports to wages in manufacture of wearing apparel and food. The international trade between Turkey and the EU-15 validates to some extent the Stolper-Samuelson theorem.

This paper analyses the relation between Czech exports in goods and services and German GDP. In order to contribute to the current state of knowledge the analysis goes more into detail in terms of disaggregating the German GDP. Do Czech exports depend more on German domestic absorption, or is it, rather, German exports which determine Czech exports? Does the Czech Republic produce goods for German consumers or is it an ""outsourced"" supplier to German export channels, instead? Co-integration analysis and the analysis of the commodity structure of Czech exports to Germany are employed to address these questions. The indings of this research indicate that the relationship between Czech exports and German GDP is a very complex one. The Czech economy can be considered a part of German distribution channels, which serves as its specialized outsourced production capacity.

This papers analyses impact of firm characteristics, i.e. size, length of exporting experience, capital ownership and type of industry on export barriers' perception in case of Serbian exporters. This study is aimed at an identification of the barriers to export among examined factors of firm's internal environment, domestic business environment and foreign markets to rank barriers according to their level of impact, to spot differences in evaluation of barriers depending on firm's characteristics, and to examine correlation between firm's characteristics and barriers to export. Main hypothesis in this research was that barriers to export for Serbian exporters have been similar to those faced by exporters in other countries, and that the level of their influence depends on firm's characteristics. The empirical research has been conducted through a survey, using a questionnaire with 178 exporters taking part in it. Collected data have been analysed by descriptive statistics, differences among groups and correlation tests. The results imply that most export barriers refer to domestic business environment and that there is a correlation among firm's size, length of export experience and capital ownership with certain factors that may cause problems for exporting business.

In this paper, the export demand and supply of German manufacturing industry is estimated for the period 1993 to 2005. The Johansen procedure (1991, 1994) is applied to estimate the long-run relationship in a VECM. Special attention is paid to the development of the German export prices being exposed to the competitive environment of fast growing countries like Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. Since they offer similar high-technology products on the international export markets and are gaining the market share, German export prices are under downward pressure. The results show that German export prices grow at a slower pace than that of the competitors and that they are negatively influenced by the growing market share of the CEECs. On the export demand side, the empirical picture corresponds to the theoretical one displaying a less unity income elasticity of demand indicating the decreasing market share for German manufactures in the long run.

This paper analyses various aspects of industrial restructuring across all ten Central and East European (CEE) candidate countries for EU membership during the last decade and provides also some comparisons with current EU Member States. The impressive structural adjustments that have taken place in CEE industries since the beginning of transition brought the structure of manufacturing industry in the majority of CEE candidate countries fairly close to the European pattern both in terms of production and employment. Technology-driven industries account for a growing share of exports in nearly all candidate countries, while labour-intensive industries have growing export shares only in less advanced candidates such as Bulgaria, Romania and in the Baltic states. The initial export specialization pattern of the more advanced CEE candidate countries has thus nearly completely reversed; a remarkable upgrading towards more sophisticated and less capital-intensive industries has occurred.