When the UK left the EU, it introduced a new import tariff schedule, one of the largest MFN tariff reforms in decades of a developed economy. This paper exploits this policy change to estimate the elasticity of imports to MFN tariffs, addressing the endogeneity of trade policy through two...

This study examines whether trade competition from low-wage countries (LWCs) can influence immigration patterns in an advanced economy. We focus on Italy between 2003 and 2013, a period characterized by rising market pressure from China and Eastern Europe. Using census data on sectoral...

China's recent restrictions on rare earth (RE) metal exports have heightened U.S. concerns over supply security. A key question is whether non-Chinese producers can substitute for China and reduce dependence. This paper examines that issue by estimating the cross-price elasticity of U.S. RE...

Do immigrants make goods from their origin country more accessible to their non-immigrant neighbors? We augment U.S. grocery scanner data to include the origin country of both households and products, thereby enabling the first direct estimate of how local immigrant presence affects import...

The literature on backward and forward linkages in global value chains (GVCs) explores the interconnectedness of production processes across different stages and locations within the global economy. The significance of imports in value chains, however, is relatively unexplored. Recognizing...

This study employs computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to estimate the effect of increase in value added tax (VAT), from 5 per cent to 7.5 per cent, on import demand and sectoral output in Nigeria. The study uses 2020 as the base year for the data analysis. The results show that increase...

This study empirically investigates the dynamics of the relationship between import demand and foreign exchange reserves for an oil-rich and high-income developing country, Oman. This study employs the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to investigate the impact of real income, domestic...

Purpose This study estimated total import demand elasticities concerning income, import prices and domestic prices. A high propensity to import constitutes a significant obstacle to economic growth in Mexico since the benefits of increased exports or any other aggregate demand expansion leak to...

This article used cointegration analysis to examine aggregate food import demand in the Caribbean region between 1979 and 2018. The article examined the long-run and short-run relationship between food imports, relative prices, real per capita income, tourist numbers, export revenue from...

The clean energy transitions require a large volume of minerals to handle its diverse technologies, such as solar photovoltaics (PV), wind turbines etc. Therefore, mineral importing countries concentrated on cleaner energy production confront an uprising trend in critical mineral prices due to...

The share of private consumption has long been small in the Chinese GDP. The share started to increase in the past decade, but the trend reversed with the covid-19 pandemic. Now as the Chinese economy reopens and recovers from covid restrictions, the share of consumption could return to a...

An interconnected world increases economic efficiency while giving certain countries leverage over others. We aim to describe and understand international power stemming from trade. Using an illustrative model of trade with possibilities of bilateral disputes and ex-post hold-ups, we highlight...

This paper estimates disaggregated import demand function for Nigeria using annual data from 1970 to 2019. The study employs the Zivot-Andrews unit root and Gregory-Hansen cointegration tests to account for the role of structural breaks and the error correction mechanism for shortrun analysis,...

In December 2019, the United States and China reached a Phase One trade agreement, under which China committed to purchase more imports from the United States: $12.5 billion more agricultural imports in 2020 and $19.5 billion more in 2021, as compared to 2017. We show that the most efficient way...

We examine the role of trade policy uncertainty in shaping the import decisions of firms. If the adoption of a new input requires a sunk cost investment, then the prospect of price increases in that input, e.g. due to trade barriers, reduces the adoption of that input (a substitution effect) and...

This paper presents empirical evidence supporting the argument that a significant asymmetry exists in the income elasticity of Greek imports. Using multivariate cointegration techniques for the estimation of long-run imports we derive short-run error correction equations that separate income...

China has witnessed rapid increases in the skill premium over the last few decades. In this paper, we study the short-run effect of capital goods imports on skill premium in China. The surge in capital goods imports, which embody advanced technology, can explain the rising demand for skills in...

Corruption and imperfect contract enforcement dramatically reduce trade. This paper estimates the reduction, using a structural model of import demand in which transactions costs impose a price markup on traded goods. We find that inadequate institutions constrain trade far more than tariffs do....

Import demand has been a major research topic in international economics for the past 80 years because of its importance for analyzing trade and evaluating trade policies. The goal of this paper is to survey the literature and conduct a meta-analysis of empirical studies on import demand with...

The objective of this paper is to examine the factors that influence Guinea's overall import demand using annual data covering the period 1980-2015. Through the Error Correction Model (ECM), we estimated the short- and long-term relationships to measure the effect of real investment expenditure,...

Recent studies have used import data to assess the impact of foreign varieties on prices and welfare for a home country. The reliance on import data has a number of limitations. First, these papers rely on goods categories defined by the Harmonized System. Second, they define varieties using the...

In this paper we reconsider a key empirical prediction generated by an important class of political-economy models of trade policy, namely that trade protection should be higher in sectors characterized by lower import penetration (we call this the little support for this prediction. In this...

The issue of market efficiency attracted the attention of academics since the existence of financial markets. Over time, two schools of thoughts were established: the efficient markets school and the behavioral finance school. Proponents of the former believed in the Efficient Markets Hypothesis...

In this paper we build a model of trade in vertically differentiated products and find that income inequality can affect the demand for imports even in the presence of homothetic preferences. The empirical importance of changes in inequality on the demand for imports is then assessed by...

For the last fifty years, countries in Asia and elsewhere have witnessed a surge in aggregate savings per capita. Some empirical studies attribute this trend to the increases in life longevity of the populations of these countries. It has been argued that the rise in savings is short-run,...

The aim of this paper is to improve our understanding of the key determinants of intra- and extra-euro area imports. Using a simultaneous equation estimation framework, and pooling the data across nine euro area countries as an approximation of the euro area, we estimate intra- and extra-euro...

It is common to observe that demand elasticities in trade equations for imports are implausibly large, and that they differ between countries. Both of these present us with problems, as they imply trade will rise without bound as a proportion of GDP. The research reported here looks for...