 Deductions from the Export Basket: Capabilities, Wealth and TradeJohn Sutton and Daniel Trefler No 16834, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc Abstract: This paper re-explores the relation between a country's level of wealth and the mix of products it exports. We argue that both are simultaneously determined by countries' capabilities i.e. by countries' productivity and quality levels for each good. Our theoretical setup has two features. (1) Some goods have fewer high-quality producers/countries than others i.e. there is Ricardian comparative advantage. (2) Imperfect competition allows high- and low-quality producers to coexist, which we refer to as 'product ranges'. These two features generate a very particular non-monotonic, general equilibrium relationship between a country's export mix and its wage (GDP per capita). We show that this non-monotonicity permeates the 1980-2005 international data on trade and GDP per capita. Our setup also explains two other facets of the data: (1) Product ranges are huge and (2) for the poorest third of countries, changes in export mix substantially over-predict growth in GDP per capita. This suggests that the main challenge for low-income countries is to raise quality and productivity in their existing product lines. JEL-codes: F12 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:16834 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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