Why Do Nations Trade (So Little)?

James Anderson

No 428, Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics

Abstract: There isn't nearly as much trade as standard models suggest there should be. Formal trade barriers and transport costs are too low to account for the difference. The pattern of missing trade has interesting variation across country pairs. These clues suggest the need for theoretical and eventually structural empirical work on the missing transactions costs. This paper reviews recent empirical findings and some promising research directions in search, predation and contract theory.

Keywords: trade costs; gravity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 F13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 1999-08-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ind
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Published, Pacific Economic Review 5 (2000), 115-134.

Downloads: (external link)
http://fmwww.bc.edu/EC-P/wp428.pdf main text (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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boc:bocoec:428

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill MA 02467 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christopher F Baum ().