Trade Facilitation and Country Size

Mohammad Amin () and Jamal Haidar ()
Additional contact information
Mohammad Amin: World Bank - Enterprise Analysis Unit

Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne

Abstract: It is argued that compared with large countries, small countries rely more on trade and therefore they are more likely to adopt liberal trading policies. The present paper extends this idea beyond the conventional trade openness measures by analyzing the relationship between country size and the number of documents required to export and import, a measure of trade facilitation. Three important results follow. First, trade facilitation does improve as the country size becomes smaller; that is, small countries perform better than large countries in terms of trade facilitation. Second, the relationship between country size and trade facilitation is non-linear, much stronger for the relatively small than the large countries. Third, contrary to what the existing studies might suggest, the relationship between country size and trade facilitation does not appear to be driven by the fact that small countries trade more as a proportion of their GDP than the large countries

Keywords: Country size; trade facilitation; openness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 F13 F14 F15 F50 F55 H10 K00 L5 O20 O24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2012-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2012/12045.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Trade facilitation and country size (2014)
Working Paper: Trade Facilitation and Country Size (2014)
Working Paper: Trade Facilitation and Country Size (2014)
Working Paper: Trade facilitation and country size (2013)
Working Paper: Trade Facilitation and Country Size (2012)
Working Paper: Trade Facilitation and Country Size (2012)
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:mse:cesdoc:12045

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Label ().