Market Structure in the Distribution Sector and Merchandise Trade

Hildegunn Nordås, Massimo Geloso Grosso and Enrico Pinali
Additional contact information
Massimo Geloso Grosso: OECD

No 68, OECD Trade Policy Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: This study aims at exploring how recent developments in the retail sector affect trade in consumer goods. It focuses on three areas of development: i) internationalisation; ii) market structure; and iii) the growing market share of retailers? private labels. It distinguishes between food and non-food products as there are significant differences between the sourcing patterns of these two product categories. The gravity model is extended by integrating a retail intermediary sector, and a novel estimation technique (zero inflated Poisson) is proposed. It is found that the foreign operations of a retailer are positively related to imports from the host to the home country of the retailer. The rate of market concentration and the market share of private labels are both found to be negatively related to imports of food and positively related to imports of non-food consumer goods, but private labels tend to shift sourcing towards low-income countries. Lower tariffs yield a stronger import response in countries with a less concentrated retail sector, particularly for food items suggesting that competition policy and trade policy are complementary. In developing countries the entry of international retailers can have a positive impact on exports and product quality.

Keywords: gravity model; retail sector; trade in consumer goods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-02-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com and nep-int
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/244328264654 (text/html)

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:oec:traaab:68-en

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OECD Trade Policy Papers from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().