Upgrading of Exports: Does the Integration into Trade Agreements Pave the Way to Product Upgrading?

Katharina Längle ()
Additional contact information
Katharina Längle: Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne - Université Paris 1 panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris School of Economics

Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne

Abstract: This paper investigate whether trade agreements help middle income countries to upgrade their product portfolio exported to high income countries. Combining product level trade flows from the CEPPII-Baci database with information on product complexity from the Atlas of Economic Complexity and the DESTA database on trade agreements, this question is studied for a set of 135 countries between 2001 and 2013 based on a gravity framework. In thhis context, the development of the extensive and intensive margins for high complex products is considered as proxy for product upgrading. By exploiting the cross sectional dimension of the panel, this study finds that middle income countries export a wider product scope of complex goods if their trade relation is covered by an agreement including trade provisions related to competition, services and investments, compared to country pairs without an equivalent framework. Still, the consideration of the time dimension leads to ambiguous effect of these provisions. While positive estimation results for the intensive margin of complex goods are in line with related papers, negative effects on the extensive margin of complex goods are at odds with expectations of the mechanism between agreements and trade

Keywords: Empirical Studies of Trade; Economic Complexity; Trade Integration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 F15 F53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2020-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2020/20006.pdf (application/pdf)
https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02899973

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:mse:cesdoc:20006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Label ().