Does quality differentiation matter in exporters' pricing behaviour? Comparing China and India

Sushanta Mallick () and Helena Marques

China Economic Review, 2016, vol. 40, issue C, 71-90

Abstract: The product quality dimension has been rarely mentioned as a factor explaining the heterogeneous pricing strategies of exporters. This could underestimate the degree of mark-up adjustment and the extent of incomplete exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) at a disaggregated level across products and destination markets. This paper investigates the role of quality differentiation in price discrimination using data for China and India's exports disaggregated at the 6-digit product level across destination markets. The paper adopts an empirical approach that incorporates gravity model explanatory factors and allows disentangling the effect of quality on trade prices and volumes from that of other sources of price variation. After excluding short duration export spells, China's export prices denominated in foreign currency terms increase with the yuan's depreciation, implying an increase in exporters' mark-ups, but they decrease as expected in the case of India. However, mark-up increases decline with product quality and destination market income, as the elasticity of demand perceived by exporters increases. These findings remain robust to different measures of quality, samples, specifications, and to the potential endogeneity of quality.

Keywords: Exchange-rate pass-through; Pricing-to-market; Quality; India; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 F41 O11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X16300633
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:chieco:v:40:y:2016:i:c:p:71-90

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2016.06.001

Access Statistics for this article

China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu

More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().