China's remarkable poverty alleviation is quite uneven across regions in the last quarter of the century. It is important to explore why China has such huge disparity in poverty distribution in spite of overall dramatic economic growth and the vast improvement in per capita income. The aim of...

A theory is outlined for why an expansion of international trade may aggravate inequality in developing countries such as China.

The development over time of market integration between Chinese provinces is analyzed by estimating threshold vector error correction models for rolling windows during 1998-2003. Transaction costs clearly decrease during this period characterized by liberalization of external trade and domestic...

The paper explores theoretically and empirically why trade intermediaries (TIs) are frequently used as agents for exports to some countries but not to others. We adapt a standard intra-industry trade model with variable export costs (e.g. transport) and fixed export costs (e.g. market access) to...

A structural gravity model is used to estimate barriers to services trade across many sectors, countries and time. Since the disaggregated output data needed to flexibly infer border barriers are often missing for services, we derive a novel methodology for projecting output data. The empirical...

This paper assesses whether the sensitivity of bilateral trade volumes to various trade cost factors is constant or varies across countries. It utilizes a random coeffcients model and analyses a cross-sectional sample of bilateral trade data for 96 countries in 2005. We expect the elasticity of...

By combining datasets from various resources, this paper establishes an ad valorem freight cost measure for China's exports from 2000 to 2006. We find that on average, the freight cost is about 10% of the FOB value per shipment. Comparing the freight cost with the tariff cost, the average...

Recent literature has highlighted the major contribution of multi-product firms to international trade activity. Such firms ship several product categories to foreign destinations each time they export. Our objective is to document the contribution of product selection to the reaction of firms...

Trade costs are crucial in new economic geography (NEG) models. The unavailability of actual trade costs data requires the approximation of trade costs. Most NEG studies do not deal with the ramifications of the particular trade costs specification used. This paper shows that the specification...