Trade, Resource Reallocation and Industry Heterogeneity

Juan Blyde

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Recent trade models with heterogeneous firms (Bernard et al., 2003 and Melitz, 2003) show how lower trade costs can spur aggregate productivity by forcing lower productivity firms out of the market, cutting off the lower tail of the productivity distribution. In this paper we find significant heterogeneity regarding this impact across different industries. In particular, we find that the exit of inefficient plants due to stronger import competition is very prominent in light industries, that is, in industries in which only a limited amount of capital is needed and where most plants are of small-scale. In contrast, we find no significant effects of import competition on the exit of plants in heavy industries. The result has important policy implications regarding the role of trade reform in boosting aggregate productivity, particularly in industries with high levels of distortions.

Keywords: Trade costs; productivity; resource reallocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 F14 L1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-09-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eff and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/24767/1/MPRA_paper_24767.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:24767

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().