دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی گسترش اتحادیه اروپا و تفاوت کالاهای جدید در تجارت اتریش - اشپرینگر 2017

Abstract

This paper comments on the article ‘EU Enlargement and the New Goods Margin in Austrian Trade’ by John T. Dalton (Open Econ Rev 28(1):61–78, 2017). Dalton measures the new goods margin of trade between Austria and the new entrants to the EU in 2004, following the methodology proposed by Timothy Kehoe and Kim Ruhl (J Polit Econ 121(2):358–392, 2013). The present paper argues that the author overlooked the implicit requirement of using a consistent product classification, leading to overestimation of the new goods margin. After replicating Dalton’s results and recalculating the trade share of the new goods margin using a consistent product classification, this paper shows the magnitude of the overestimation (up to 20 or 30 decimal points of the trade share).

3 Conclusion

This short paper comments on the results reported by Dalton (2017) concerning the role of the least traded goods in Austrian trade with the group of the ten new entrants to the EU in 2004. Although Dalton correctly applied the Kehoe and Ruhl (2013) methodology with Comext trade data, he overlooked the implicit requirement of using a consistent product classification. This problem leads to significant overestimation of the trade share of the least traded goods. After converting the Comext data into a consistent product classification, I show the magnitude of this overestimation.

In my opinion, product classification issues can be cumbersome and are not sufficiently addressed in many empirical papers using trade data at the product level. In this respect, Dalton’s paper is an illustrative example of the problems that an inconsistent product classification can generate.