scholarly journals Export Margins, Price and Quantity of Belarus’s Export Growth

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-99
Author(s):  
Shavkat Otamurodov ◽  
Shujin Zhu ◽  
Ihtisham ul Haq ◽  
Tenglong Zhong

Abstract This paper examines the sources of Belarus’s export growth and decomposes export growth into extensive and intensive margins. This study also aims to determine export margins for intermediate and final goods and to determine the price and quantity components of the intensive export margin. In order to achieve the desired objectives, we use two methods for decomposing export growth, the count method and the export shares method. We analyse Belarus's export growth using export data at the HS-6 digit level for the 2004-2014 period. Our results show that Belarus's exports grew mainly due to growth in the price margin during the studied period 2004-2014. However, the extensive margin was important in export growth to some extent. Comparing the growth rate across final and intermediate goods reveals that although the share of final products in Belarus’s exports is not very big (18.9% in 2014), the average annual growth in exports of final products is higher than that of intermediate goods. Our investigation also shows that Belarus produces a wide range of commodities, but the share of the most of these commodities is not large; its exports depend on a restricted range of commodities. Moreover, most of the commodities are exported to Russia and Ukraine. Our results give us reason to assume that finding new markets for their new products is one of the main challenges for developing countries wishing to increase their exports by an extensive margin. This has important implications for how policy makers promote the trade and diversification of exports.

Author(s):  
Marianne Matthee ◽  
Maria Santana-Gallego

Background: The significance of the paper is twofold. Firstly, it adds to the small but growing body of literature focusing on the decomposition of South Africa’s export growth. Secondly, it identifies the determinants of the intensive and extensive margins of South Africa’s exports – a topic that (as far as the authors are concerned) has not been explored before.Aim: This paper aims to investigate a wide range of market access determinants that affect South Africa’s export growth along the intensive and extensive margins.Setting: Export diversification has been identified as one of the critical pillars of South Africa’s much-hoped-for economic revival. Although recent years have seen the country’s export product mix evolving, there is still insufficient diversification into new markets with high value-added products. This is putting a damper on export performance as a whole and, in turn, hindering South Africa’s economic growth.Methods: A Heckman selection gravity model is applied using highly disaggregated data. The first stage of the process revealed the factors affecting the probability of South Africa exporting to a particular destination (extensive margin). The second stage, which modelled trade flows, revealed the variables that affect export volumes (intensive margin).Results: The results showed that South Africa’s export product mix is relatively varied, but the number of export markets is limited. In terms of the extensive margin (or the probability of exporting), economic variables such as the importing country’s GDP and population have a positive impact on firms’ decision to export. Other factors affecting the extensive margin are distance to the market (negative impact), cultural or language fit (positive impact), presence of a South African embassy abroad (positive impact), existing free trade agreement with Southern African Development Community (positive impact) and trade regulations and costs (negative impact). In terms of the intensive margin (or the factors influencing the volume of exports), there are strong parallels with the extensive margin, with the exception being that the time involved in exporting has more of an impact than documentary requirements.Conclusion: Among the factors contributing to South Africa’s exports having largely developed in the intensive margin are a general lack of market-related information, infrastructural weaknesses (both of a physical and technological nature) and a difficult regulatory environment – all of which add to the cost and time involved in exporting. Policymakers have long spoken about the need for the country to diversify its export basket, but now talk about needs to give way to action. The government and its economic partners need to arrive at a common vision of an export sector that will be able to expand into new products and markets, be an active participant in global value chains and deliver sustainable jobs.


Author(s):  
Burcu Berke

Products and firms are homogeneous in traditional foreign trade theories; products show no horizontal or vertical differentiation. It is observed that growth in exports is only related to an increase in export quantity and that this is not decomposed into margins. Since Melitz's work, there has been an increase in studies that decompose the firms' heterogeneity and export growth in foreign trade into extensive and intensive margins. The concepts are addressed in the literature known as “new-new” foreign trade theories which include extensive margins, the number of exporting firms, the number of new trade partners, and the volume or variety of exported products. In brief, the growth of global trade is the result of new trade relations (extensive margin) or a rise in existing trade relations (intensive margin). As one of the rapidly developing trade theories in international economics, the main purpose of this study is to conduct a literature survey on the extensive and intensive margins of export growth.


Anticorruption in History is the first major collection of case studies on how past societies and polities, in and beyond Europe, defined legitimate power in terms of fighting corruption and designed specific mechanisms to pursue that agenda. It is a timely book: corruption is widely seen today as a major problem, undermining trust in government, financial institutions, economic efficiency, the principle of equality before the law and human wellbeing in general. Corruption, in short, is a major hurdle on the “path to Denmark”—a feted blueprint for stable and successful statebuilding. The resonance of this view explains why efforts to promote anticorruption policies have proliferated in recent years. But while the subjects of corruption and anticorruption have captured the attention of politicians, scholars, NGOs and the global media, scant attention has been paid to the link between corruption and the change of anticorruption policies over time and place. Such a historical approach could help explain major moments of change in the past as well as reasons for the success and failure of specific anticorruption policies and their relation to a country’s image (of itself or as construed from outside) as being more or less corrupt. It is precisely this scholarly lacuna that the present volume intends to begin to fill. A wide range of historical contexts are addressed, ranging from the ancient to the modern period, with specific insights for policy makers offered throughout.


Agronomy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 1566
Author(s):  
Ernesto Mesa-Vázquez ◽  
Juan F. Velasco-Muñoz ◽  
José A. Aznar-Sánchez ◽  
Belén López-Felices

Over the last two decades, experimental economics has been gaining relevance in the research of a wide range of issues related to agriculture. In turn, the agricultural activity provides an excellent field of study within which to validate the use of instruments employed by experimental economics. The aim of this study is to analyze the dynamics of the research on the application of experimental economics in agriculture on a global level. Thus, a literature review has been carried out for the period between the years 2000 and 2020 based on a bibliometric study. The main results show that there has been a growing use of experimental economics methods in the research on agriculture, particularly over the last five years. This evolution is evident in the different indicators analyzed and is reflected in the greater scientific production and number of actors involved. The most relevant topics within the research on experimental economics in agriculture focus on the farmer, the markets, the consumer, environmental policy, and public goods. These results can be useful for policy makers and researchers interested in this line of research.


Author(s):  
Frederick van der Ploeg

AbstractEconomists have adopted the Pigouvian approach to climate policy, which sets the carbon price to the social cost of carbon. We adjust this carbon price for macroeconomic uncertainty and disasters by deriving the risk-adjusted discount rate. We highlight ethics- versus market-based calibrations and discuss the effects of a falling term structure of the discount rate. Given the wide range of estimates used for marginal damages and the discount rate, it is unsurprising that negotiators and policy makers have rejected the Pigouvian approach and adopted a more pragmatic approach based on a temperature cap. The corresponding cap on cumulative emissions is lower if risk tolerance and temperature sensitivity are more uncertain. The carbon price then grows much faster than under the Pigouvian approach and discuss how this rate of growth is adjusted by economic and abatement cost risks. We then analyse how policy uncertainty and technological breakthrough can lead to the risk of stranded assets. Finally, we discuss various obstacles to successful carbon pricing.


Oryx ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. Timmins ◽  
T. D. Evans ◽  
Khamkhoun Khounboline ◽  
Chainoi Sisomphone

The large-antlered, or giant, muntjac Megamuntiacus vuquangensis wasdescribed from Vietnam in 1994 and found concurrently in the Annamite Mountains and nearby hill ranges of central and southern Laos. The northerly and southerly range limits are still unknown. It may occupy a wide range of habitats and is found sympatrically with the common muntjac Muntiacus muntjak. Another muntjac species, the taxonomic affinity of which is as yet undetermined, was recently discovered to occur within its range. The large-antlered muntjac is probably not threatened with extinction in the near future, but in view of its restricted range and threats from habitat degradation and hunting, it should be classified as Vulnerable in the Red Data Book. Its future in Laos is largely dependent on the recently created protected-areas system to maintain large tracts of habitat and reduce hunting pressure.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Poh

The view that China has become increasingly assertive under President Xi Jinping is now a common trope in academic and media discourse. However, until the end of Xi Jinping’s first term in March 2018, China had been relatively restrained in its use of coercive economic measures. This is puzzling given the conventional belief among scholars and practitioners that sanctions are a middle ground between diplomatic and military/paramilitary action. Using a wide range of methods and data — including in-depth interviews with 76 current and former politicians, policy-makers, diplomats, and commercial actors across 12 countries and 16 cities — Sanctions with Chinese Characteristics: Rhetoric and Restraint in China’s Diplomacy examines the ways in which China had employed economic sanctions to further its political objectives, and the factors explaining China’s behaviour. This book provides a systematic investigation into the ways in which Chinese decisionmakers approached sanctions both at the United Nations Security Council and unilaterally, and shows how China’s longstanding sanctions rhetoric has had a constraining effect on its behaviour, resulting in its inability to employ sanctions in complete alignment with its immediate interests.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cendri Hutcherson ◽  
Constantine Sharpinskyi ◽  
Michael E. W. Varnum ◽  
Amanda Modesta Rotella ◽  
Alexandra Wormley ◽  
...  

Effective management of global crises relies on expert judgment of their societal effects. How accurate are such judgments? In the spring of 2020, we asked behavioral scientists (N = 717) and lay Americans (N = 394) to make predictions about COVID-19 pandemic-related societal change across social and psychological domains. Six months later we obtained retrospective assessments for the same domains (N scientists = 270; N layPeople = 411). Scientists and lay people were equally inaccurate in judging COVID’s impact, both in prospective predictions and retrospective assessments. Across studies and samples, estimates of the magnitude of change were off by more than 20% and less than half of participants accurately predicted the direction of changes. Critically, these insights go against public perceptions of behavioral scientists’ ability to forecast such changes (N layPeople = 203; N academics/policy-makers = 30): behavioral scientists were considered most likely to accurately predict societal change and most sought after for recommendations across a wide range of professions. Taken together, we find that behavioral scientsits and lay people fared poorly at predicting the societal consequences of the pandemic and misperceive what effects it may have already had.


2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-72
Author(s):  
Saeed Rouhani ◽  
Ehsan Abedin

Purpose Crypto-currencies, decentralized electronic currencies systems, denote a radical change in financial exchange and economy environment. Consequently, it would be attractive for designers and policy-makers in this area to make out what social media users think about them on Twitter. The purpose of this study is to investigate the social opinions about different kinds of crypto-currencies and tune the best-customized classification technique to categorize the tweets based on sentiments. Design/methodology/approach This paper utilized a lexicon-based approach for analyzing the reviews on a wide range of crypto-currencies over Twitter data to measure positive, negative or neutral sentiments; in addition, the end result of sentiments played a training role to train a supervised technique, which can predict the sentiment loading of tweets about the main crypto-currencies. Findings The findings further prove that more than 50 per cent of people have positive beliefs about crypto-currencies. Furthermore, this paper confirms that marketers can predict the sentiment of tweets about these crypto-currencies with high accuracy if they use appropriate classification techniques like support vector machine (SVM). Practical implications Considering the growing interest in crypto-currencies (Bitcoin, Cardano, Ethereum, Litcoin and Ripple), the findings of this paper have a remarkable value for enterprises in the financial area to obtain the promised benefits of social media analysis at work. In addition, this paper helps crypto-currencies vendors analyze public opinion in social media platforms. In this sense, the current paper strengthens our understanding of what happens in social media for crypto-currencies. Originality/value For managers and decision-makers, this paper suggests that the news and campaign for their crypto in Twitter would affect people’s perspectives in a good manner. Because of this fact, the firms, investing in these crypto-currencies, could apply the social media as a magnifier for their promotional activities. The findings steer the market managers to see social media as a predictor tool, which can analyze the market through understanding the opinions of users of Twitter.


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