The revealed competitiveness of U.S. exports

Massimo Del Gatto, Filippo di Mauro (), Joseph Gruber and Benjamin Mandel ()

No 1026, International Finance Discussion Papers from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Abstract: The U.S. share of world merchandise exports has declined sharply over the last decade. Using data at the level of detailed industries, this paper analyzes the decline in U.S. share against the backdrop of alternative measures of the competitiveness of the U.S. economy. We document the following facts: (i) only a few industries contributed to the decline in any meaningful way, (ii) a large part of the drop was driven by the changing size of U.S. export industries and not the size of U.S. sales within those industries, (iii) in a gravity framework, the majority of the decline in the U.S. export share within industries was due to the declining U.S. share of world income, and (iv) in a computed structural measure of firm productivity, average U.S. export productivity has generally maintained its high level versus other countries over time. Overall, our analysis suggests that the dismal performance of the U.S. market share is not a sufficient statistic for competitiveness.

Keywords: Exports - United States; Industrial Productivity - United States; Competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse and nep-eff
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Working Paper: The "Revealed" Competitiveness of U.S. Exports (2012)
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