This paper gives evidence to a stylized fact often disregarded in international trade empirics: countries' diversification. In the last fifteen years, the growth of world trade coexisted with the tendency of countries to reduce the specialization of their export composition along the development path. On average, countries do not specialize, they diversify. Our semiparametric empirical analysis shows how this result is robust to the use of different statistical indexes used to measure trade specialization to the level of sectoral aggregation and to the level of smoothing in the nonparametric term associated to income per capita. Using a General Additive Model (GAM) with country-specific fixed-effect, we show that, controlling for countries heterogeneity, sectoral export diversification increases with income.
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Paper provided by Sapienza University of Rome, CIDEI in its series Working Papers with number
73.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C14 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: General - - - Semiparametric and Nonparametric Methods E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles F10 - International Economics - - Trade - - - General
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Andrea Brasili & Paolo Epifani & Rodolfo Helg, 2000.
"On the Dynamics of Trade Patterns,"
CESPRI Working Papers
115, CESPRI, Centre for Research on Innovation and Internationalisation, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy, revised Jul 2000.
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