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National borders matter... where one draws the lines too

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Author Info

  • Lavallée, E.
  • Vicard, V.

Abstract

The fact that crossing a political border dramatically reduces trade flows has been widely documented in the literature. The increasing number of borders has surprisingly attracted much less attention. The number of independent countries has indeed risen from 72 in 1948 to 192 today. This paper estimates the effect of political disintegration since World War II on the measured growth in world trade. We first show that trade statistics should be considered carefully when assessing globalization over time, since the definition of trade partners varies over time. We document a sizeable resulting accounting artefact, which accounts for 17% of the growth in world trade since 1948. Second, we estimate that political disintegration alone since World War II has raised measured international trade flows by 9% but decreased actual trade flows (including inter-regional trade) by 4%...

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Banque de France in its series Working papers with number 272.

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Length: 32 pages
Date of creation: 2010
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:bfr:banfra:272

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Related research

Keywords: Trade; Borders; Political disintegration; Trade statistics.;

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References

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  1. Cette, G. & Lopez, J., 2009. "ICT Demand Behaviour: an International Comparison," Working papers 252, Banque de France.
  2. Horny, G. & Picchio, M., 2009. "Identification of lagged duration dependence in multiple-spell competing risks models," Working papers 260, Banque de France.
  3. Renne, J-P., 2009. "Frequency-domain analysis of debt service in a macro-finance model for the euro area," Working papers 261, Banque de France.
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Blog mentions

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  1. Increasing trade by creating more borders
    by Economic Logician in Economic Logic on 2010-05-07 14:09:00

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