Imports "R" Us: Retail Chains as Platforms for Developing-Country Imports

Emek Basker and Van Pham ()

No 804, Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Missouri

Abstract: Wal-Mart and other larger retail chains are often identified with cheap imports. We use data from the Census of Retail Trade and the International Trade Commission to test the theory that big retail chains serve as a platform for imports from LDCs. Controlling for overall sector growth, Chinese and other LDC imports have increased disproportionately in retail sectors with the largest consolidation into chains over the period 19972002. Our estimation results imply that between 1997 and 2002 the marginal propensity to import from China was 3.3 times larger for the largest firms than for smaller retailers. The disproportionate growth of large retailers over this period explains 19% of the growth in consumer goods imports from China.

Keywords: Imports; Retail Chains (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F12 F14 L11 L81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-int and nep-tra
Date: 2008-04-23
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://economics.missouri.edu/working-papers/2008/WP0804_basker.pdf (application/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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:umc:wpaper:0804

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Missouri
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Stratton ().