The Turkey-Africa Bromance: Key Drivers, Agency, and Prospects

Turkish-African relations have consistently exhibited strong growth since Ankara declared 2005 as ‘the year of Africa.’ Turkey’s growing economic, political, and security involvement in Africa reflects Ankara’s need to establish new markets for its manufactured goods and its defense and armaments industry and present itself as a relevant regional and global actor different from traditional Western players on the continent. African countries have been astute in their engagement with Ankara in terms of exercising leverage in the evolving Turkish-African partnership. They seek to attract Turkish foreign direct investment, diversify economic and political partners to reduce dependency and fuel their state-building projects. Ankara’s domestic economic woes notwithstanding, Turkey’s growing footprint in Africa will likely continue to produce positive results for both sides.

The impact of exchange rate volatility on trade: The evidence from Russia

This paper analyzes the effects of exchange rate volatility on exports and imports of a range of goods between Russia and its 70 trading partners from 2004 until 2018. The goods in question fall into eight product categories, as follows: (i) agricultural raw materials­; (ii) chemicals; (iii) food; (iv) fuels; (v) manufactured goods; (vi) ores and metals­; (vii) textiles; and (viii) machinery and transport equipment. Exchange rate volatility­ is measured using the standard deviation of the first difference in the logarithmic daily nominal exchange rate. The paper concludes that exchange rate volatility had a negative impact on exports of agricultural raw materials, manufactured goods, and machinery and transport equipment. In contrast, it was found to have a positive and significant impact on trade in fuels and imports of chemicals and textiles.

The Analysis of Automatic Adjustment Mechanism of Balance of Payments-Evidence from Manufactured Goods Exporters

The balance of payments is the most scientific and complete record of international economic exchanges and transaction flows, and will be affected by interest rates, exchange rates, trade, finance, foreign exchange management and foreign investment. Studies related to balance of payment dominate in those increasingly open and developing economies, particularly for the manufactured goods exporters where manufacturing is the backbone, driver and display of modernization. This paper explores time trend analysis to analyze the automatic adjustment mechanism of balance of payments for manufactured goods exporters based on data from United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. The stability, cointegration, and causality tests are performed followed by multiple regression analysis that corporates one-period lagged and log-formed models. The results are found to be consistent with theoretical analysis except for foreign direct investment. Granger causality tests demonstrate consumer price index and export are the causes of foreign direct investment, which might distort the explanation of foreign direct investment to balance of payment for manufactured goods exporters.

Gas crunch will prolong the energy crisis into 2022

Significance Particularly in Europe, where gas-fired generation sets the marginal power price, high gas prices are being passed directly through into higher electricity prices. Impacts Low-income households will be particularly hard hit by increased gas and power prices, despite government efforts to protect consumers. Reduced industrial activity will hamper the process of supply chain restocking and pass price pressures through to manufactured goods. High liquefied natural gas (LNG) prices will support new investment in LNG capacity, but also restrain coal-to-gas switching in Asia.

China’s bilateral trade in Africa: is institutional structure a determinant?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the institutional structures and other predictors that determine bilateral trade between Africa and China from 1995 to 2017. Design/methodology/approach In line with the gravity model of trade, institutional, geographical and socio-economic determinants of China’s bilateral trade with 18 African oil/minerals exporting countries are examined by deploying Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood and dynamic bias-corrected least squares dummy variable econometric techniques. Findings The results indicate that China’s oil/minerals imports from Africa are higher than imports of manufacturing and agricultural goods, and institutional structures indicate that a weak politically stable region with less control of corruption has a discernible effect on trade. Research limitations/implications Further insight can be gained if the type of manufactured goods being exported to China is examined; this is necessary given that China crowds out Africa’s manufactured goods. Therefore, this study recommends the need for Africa to continually strengthen its institutional structures to stimulate trade from other regions. Originality/value This study examines the quality of the institutional structures (political stability and corruption) in African oil/minerals exporting countries, considering that China has been alleged for capitalising on Africa’s weak institutional structures to trade with the resource-endowed region. For the first time, the UN COMTRADE HS product-country-partner-year trade data is used to examine on bilateral sector trade China–Africa links rather than proxies used in the studies of Biggeri and Sanfilippo (2009), De Grauwe et al. (2012) and Foad (2011) that did not capture the real trade value.

Analysis on Ethiopia’s Revealed Comparative Advantage and Its Structural Transformation

This study examines Ethiopia’s structural transformation by using the revealed comparative advantage approach using export data for years 1996–2018. Primary and low technology manufactured products have comparative advantage over other product groups for the periods 1996 to 2018. However, there is an improvement in all manufactured product categories except except low technology manufactured products (textile, garment and footwear) and resource-based manufactured goods. Thus, based on revealed comparative, structural transformation has occurred in the Ethiopian economy over the last decades but it is very insignificant. Hence, Ethiopia reveals strong comparative advantage in export of primary products, it is important to add value to these products for higher export earnings.

Exploring the U-shape geographical bias in manufactured exports of MERCOSUR countries

We proposed a novel approach to understand the industrialization pattern of MERCOSUR countries during the last 60 years. We performed an index to measure the geographical bias of manufactured exports between the region and the world and showed that regional trade agreements allowed MERCOSUR countries to decrease the bias and increase competitiveness. However, we noted that in recent years the bias deepened in favor of exporting a higher proportion of manufactured goods to the region. Our main result is that these economies present a U-shape geographical bias in manufactured exports associated with a bimodal distribution of breaks. Furthermore, we observed that the 1980s and 2000s were the most relevant periods for defining the region trends.

Tapping Global Potential of Pakistan in Merchandise Trade: Evidence from PPML Based Gravity Model and Trade Potential Index

This study aims to assess the trade potential of Pakistan in terms of destinations and products against 101 potential trading partners while applying the gravity model and the trade potential index. The findings indicate that Pakistan’s trade/export potential is maximum with the countries which are not its traditional trading partners. On the other hand, “manufactured goods”, “misc manufactured articles” and “food groups” are the products where maximum trade/export potential exists. Results indicate that Pakistan should not only adopt proactive measures to tap non-traditional partners but it is equally important to strengthen the level of trade with its traditional trading partners.

International Trade and Economic Performance in Tanzania: Further Evidence

The study investigated the role of international trade in economic performance in Tanzania for the post reform period, from 1980 to 2018. International trade is measured by disaggregated imports and exports while economic performance is measured by GDP growth. Exports are disaggregated into manufactured goods and non-manufactured goods while imports are disaggregated into capital goods and intermediate goods. To obtain robust non-spurious regression results, Dickey-Fuller (D-F) and Phillips-Peron (PP) Unit Root tests were performed. Johansen Co-integration tests were employed to investigate long-run relationships between export, imports and economic growth. The Johansen test suggested a long-run relationship between international trade and its components and economic development. In addition, the Error Correction Model (ECM) results further supported a long-run relationship between international trade and economic growth in Tanzania. This calls for further opening of the economy and further liberalisation of trade restrictions.

Regional Investigation for Economies of Development Status on Changes in Export Structure of Deterioration Terms of Trade

The theory of Deterioration Terms of Trade states that the terms of trade between primary commodities and manufactures have a negative deterministic trend. However, the terms of trade for primary commodities have improved significantly because of higher prices of raw materials and natural resources due to the rapid development of some emerging developing countries. Literatures argued that the deterioration in terms of trade is the type of country in which the goods are exported rather than the types of goods exported by such countries are primary or manufactured goods. This paper employs regression models of alternative economies to analyze the correlation between terms of trade and manufactured goods export ratio. Results demonstrated that the Prebisch-Singer Hypothesis holds for all the economies except the developed ones, and the ITTs are worsened by increases in the proportion of manufactured goods for all the economies.