La migration est la dimension négligée de la mondialisation, assure Tobias Müller. Le professeur d’économie à l’Université de Genève plaide pour des mesures actives d’insertion.
This paper provides a new theoretically-derived measure of preference margins at the product level, that takes into account competition across exporters as well as competition with domestic producers on a given market. This indicator is derived for differentiated goods under imperfect competition, in a frame-work extended from Ottaviano, Tabuchi and Thisse (2002). We compute our theoretically-based preference margin measure for the European Union market access over 5,000 products (HS-6 digits) exported by an exhaustive sample of 222 countries in 2008. This new measure reveals very low preference margins once adjusted for domestic and import competition. We also provide econometric correlations validating the relevance of both our “preferred” preference margin indicator and the theoretical framework used to derive it.
The aim of this paper is (i) to assess the impact of regional agreements on members’ trade in Sub-Saharan Africa (intra-regional trade as well as trade with the rest of the world), controlling for the other traditional determinants and (ii) to compare the respective effect of the preferential trade agreements and the currency unions. Considering the period 1962–96, we first assess the average impact of each regional agreement on their implementation period and second we show how these impacts have evolved. An ‘augmented’ gravity model is designed, relying on a transport cost function, in which specific dummies allow trade creation and trade diversion effects to be separated. The model is estimated in panel with bilateral specific effects, to isolate the non-observable characteristics of each pair of countries and according to the Hausman–Taylor (1981) method, which takes into account a possible endogeneity of some explanatory variables. During their implementation, the African regional trade agreements have generated a significant increase in trade between members, although initially often through trade diversion. In the two agreements of the CFA franc zone, the currency unions have largely reinforced the positive effect of the corresponding preferential trade agreements on intra-regional trade, while dampening their trade diversion effect.
This paper uses a gravity model to assess ex-post regional trade agreements. The model includes 130 countries and is estimated with panel data over the period 1962–1996. The introduction of the correct number of dummy variables allows for identification of Vinerian trade creation and trade diversion effects, while the estimation method takes into account the unobservable characteristics of each pairs of trade partner countries, the endogeneity of some of the explanatory variables as well as a potential selection bias. In contrast to previous estimates, results show that regional agreements have generated a significant increase in trade between members, often at the expense of the rest of the world.
In this paper, after a review of the evolution of the literature on climate change economics in agriculture, I present some evidence of the impact of different moments of the distribution of rainfall on farmers risk aversion. It is found that while more rainfall is negatively associated with the probability of observing risk aversion, rainfall variability is positively correlated. This result highlights an important behavioural dimension of climatic factors.
