Overall Specialization and Income: Countries Diversity

Luca De Benedictis (), Marco Gallegati and Massimo Tamberi

No 37-2006, Working Papers from Macerata University, Department of Finance and Economic Sciences

Abstract:

This paper gives evidence to a stylized fact often disregarded in international trade empir- ics: countries' diversification. In the last fifteen years, the growth of world trade coexisted with the tendency of countries to reduce the specialization of their export composition along the development path. On average, countries do not specialize, they diversify. Our semiparametric empirical analysis shows how this result is robust to the use of different statistical indexes used to measure trade specialization to the level of sectoral aggrega- tion and to the level of smoothing in the nonparametric term associated to income per capita. Using a General Additive Model (GAM) with country-specific fixed-effect, we show that, controlling for countries heterogeneity, sectoral export diversification increases with income.

Keywords: Nonparametrics; International Trade; Specialization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29
Date: 2006-10, Revised 2008-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Forthcoming in The Review of World Economics, 1, 2009

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