Product Quality and Intra-Industry Trade

Tadashi Ito and Toshihiro Okubo

CAMA Working Papers from Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

Abstract: In this study, we argue that the conventional intra-industry trade (IIT) index does not directly address the quality issue and propose a methodology to make full use of unit-price gap information to deduce quality differences between simultaneously exported and imported products. By applying this measure to German trade data at the eight-digit level, we study the quality change of Chinese export goods in its IIT with Germany. We compare the case of China with those of Eastern European countries, which are also major trading partners of Germany. Our results show that the unit-value difference in IIT between Germany and Eastern European countries is clearly narrowing. However, China’s export prices to Germany are much lower than Germany’s export prices to China, and this gap has not narrowed over the last 23 years. This is at odds with the common perception that China’s product quality has improved, as documented by Rodrik (2006) and Schott (2008). Our results support Xu (2010), which argued that incorporating the quality aspect of the exported goods weakens or even eliminates the evidence of the sophistication of Chinese export goods in Rodrik (2006).

Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2014-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-int and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cama.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/fil ... 4_2014_ito_okubo.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: PRODUCT QUALITY AND INTRA-INDUSTRY TRADE (2016)
Working Paper: Product quality and intra-industry trade (2014)
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:een:camaaa:2014-74

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAMA Working Papers from Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cama Admin ().