Intraregional trade in South America, 1913-50. Economic linkages before institutional agreements

José Peres-Cajías, Marc Badia-Miró () and Anna Carreras-Marín ()

No 270, Working Papers in Economics from Universitat de Barcelona. Espai de Recerca en Economia

Abstract: With the exception of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), trade integration is still modest in Latin America, at around 20% of total trade. Surprisingly, these levels were higher in 1945, when the figure for imports stood at 25.6%. Paradoxically, this result shows that trade integration reached its peak before trade integration agreements were signed. To understand the reasons for this, we examine intraregional trade throughout the interwar period (1913-1950). We analyze five national cases: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Peru. As far as we know, this is the first paper in the literature on intraregional trade during the interwar period. There are other papers on intraregional trade in Latin America, but they focus on the period after the 1960s. The analysis of intraregional trade in the interwar period is also useful to the Latin American industrialization debate. Given the disruption in world trade flows and the existence of some industrial capacity, the paper looks at any possible increase in intra-industry trade. There are two main conclusions: a) with the exception of the World War periods, intraregional trade has been low since 1913; b) in general, intraregional trade reflects the overall trade specialization: there is a high concentration of low value added products.

JEL-codes: F15 N46 N76 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 0 pages
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ere.ub.es/dtreball/E12270.rdf/at_download/file
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.ere.ub.es:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

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:bar:bedcje:2012270

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from Universitat de Barcelona. Espai de Recerca en Economia Espai de Recerca en Economia, Facultat de Ciències Econòmiques. Tinent Coronel Valenzuela, Num 1-11 08034 Barcelona. Spain.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Espai de Recerca en Economia ().