Is Our World Going to Get a Whole Lot Smaller?

Byron Gangnes (), Alyson C. Ma and Ari Van Assche

CIRANO Working Papers from CIRANO

Abstract: The surge of oil prices in recent years has led to speculation that rising transportation costs could end the period of dramatic world trade growth in the words of Rubin (2009), Your world is going to get a whole lot smaller. Using data from China's Customs Statistics, we examine the impact of oil prices on trade's sensitivity to distance. We find that higher oil prices increase trade's elasticity to distance, but that the economic effect is small. We also find that the effect is more pronounced for trade within global production networks, and less large for goods shipped by air.

Keywords: oil prices; distance; trade; vertical specialization; mode of transport; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-02-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-ene
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cirano.qc.ca/files/publications/2011s-31.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cir:cirwor:2011s-31

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CIRANO Working Papers from CIRANO Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Webmaster ().