Destination and source countries: Do they have a role on product quality?

Adriana Peluffo and Juan Ignacio Scasso ()
Additional contact information
Juan Ignacio Scasso: Universidad de la República (Uruguay). Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración. Instituto de Economí­a

No 16-10, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Instituto de Economía - IECON

Abstract: In this work we explore the link between export and import products quality and the level of income of destination and source countries. As proxy to quality we use a firm-level measure calculated from the unit value prices of both exports and imports of Uruguayan manufacturing firms. Previous works argue that high quality products are exported to and imported from high income countries. Moreover, it is also argued that firms that export to high income countries upgrade their quality by using imports from high income countries. We test these hypotheses using a rich database for Uruguay over the period 1997-2008. This dataset combines firm level data and detailed customs data of exports and imports by destination or origin country. To analyze causal associations we use instrumental variable techniques, and utilize real exchange rate fluctuation to construct the instruments. Our results show that exporting to high income countries has a negative effect on the quality of imported goods and that importing from high income countries has a positive effect on our measure of import quality.

Keywords: exports; imports; quality; international trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F1 L1 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/8371

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:ulr:wpaper:dt-10-16

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Instituto de Economía - IECON Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lorenza Pérez ().