Toward a Geography of Trade Costs

摘要: What are the barriers that separate nations? While recent work provides intriguing clues, we have remarkably little concrete evidence as to nature, size, and shape of barriers. This paper offers direct indirect on trade barriers, moving us toward a comprehensive geography costs. There three main contributions. One, provide detailed data freight rates for number importers. Rates vary substantially over exporters, aggregate expenditures at low end observed range. suggests import choices made so minimize transportation Two, estimate technological relationship between distance use this interpret equivalents common barrier proxies taken from literature. The calculation reveals implausibly large Three, multi-sector model isolate channels through which affect volumes. motivates an estimation technique delivers estimates substitution elasticities. allows complete characterization costs implied by flows partition those into components: explicitly measured (tariffs freight), associated with proxy variables, but unmeasured. Acknowledgments: Thanks gracious provision go Jon Haveman, Rob Feenstra, Azita Amjadi ALADI secretariat. helpful suggestions previous drafts seminar participants Universities Chicago, Michigan, Texas, Boston University, NBER 4th Annual EIIT Conference Purdue University. Finally, Julia Grebelsky Dawn Conner provided outstanding research assistance. was funded grant University Chicago’s Graduate School Business.