By examining the econometric interrelationships of rice export prices of India, Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan, the U.S., Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, this study examines the most influential rice-exporting countries in the international rice export market. The sampled countries are the source of more than 80% of the global rice exports. In the process, this study relies on online data portals of the United Nations and country-level sources for aromatic and non-aromatic rice export price information from India, Pakistan, and Thailand. This study employed the Prais-Winsten and Autoregressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) estimation processes with the error correction procedure. Combining the findings from both models, this study concludes that in terms of interactions, the non-aromatic long-grain rice price of the U.S., and the aromatic rice price of Pakistan are the most correlated prices in the international rice market. Considering the number of countries influenced by the price of a given country, our results indicate that Vietnam is the price leader in the non-aromatic long-grain market, followed by Argentina, Brazil, and India. India, the largest exporter, is the fourth top price leader. In the case of aromatic rice, Thailand is the absolute leader. Many countries in Asia and Africa rely on rice imports to meet domestic demand, where the food security situation is already precarious. Based on the findings, this study suggests closely monitoring rice production and export trends of Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, India and Thailand to provide early warning when necessary to better manage supply shocks in the international rice market.

Even at long time horizons, modern outcomes are in some sense bounded by history. Culture shapes how people interact and as it propagates across generations, groups with more common ancestors face less frictions to cooperation. This, in turn, affects institutional and technological diffusion, implying a society's history plays a crucial role in the causes of sustained long-run economic growth. To test this, we follow other studies by proxying for historical effects with genetic relatedness, which yields a temporal proportionality of shared common ancestry. Measuring cultural traits are more challenging. We develop a new systematic measure through network analysis of Wikipedia. Connectivity statistics over the encyclopaedia's hyperlink-directed network captures unique features of cultural relatedness. Further, as we index pages, we can coarsen the network into specific topics. The results show how history correlates broadly over a range of cultural factors. Differences across the coarsened networks demonstrate not simply that history matters, but where it matters less.

China has been one of the most important sources of growth in global wine demand this century, accounting for 7% of the world's wine consumption and imports by 2017, or four times its 2005 shares. But China's per capita wine consumption peaked in 2012, has fallen every year since 2017, and in 2022 was one-third of its peak, and its imports have more than halved since 2017. Certainly, the COVID-19 disruption and associated slowdown in China's income growth would account for some of that. However, the fall in China's alcohol consumption began three years earlier, and between 2019 and 2022, the fall was considerably larger for wine (47%) than for spirits (17%) and beer (3%). Thus, wine's share of alcohol consumption in China fell by two-fifths over those three years. The article speculates on the reasons behind the dramatic downturn in this globally important market and finishes by imagining future trends and drawing implications for wine-exporting countries.

Rules of Origin (RoO) are critical components of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). They are designed to stop products coming into a PTA through the partner that applies the lowest tariff – a phenomenon known as trade deflection. While RoO are necessary, complex RoO may undo the benefits of trade agreements. Using a novel database of RoO, this paper evaluates the incidence and restrictiveness of different types of Product-Specific Rules of Origin (PSRs) across 128 reciprocal PTAs for the period 1990–2015. Results, based on a structural gravity model controlling for confounding factors, display wide heterogeneity across different categories of PSRs attached to preferential margins, with more flexible PSRs associated with a significantly stronger trade effect compared to more restrictive ones where exporters do not have a choice among PSRs or have to satisfy multiple PSRs. A simulation exercise reveals that a radical simplification reform leading to the adoption of flexible PSRs providing alternative choices to prove origin would have increased global trade under PTAs on average by between 2.7 and 4% during the sample period.

Over the past three decades, tariff protection to farmers has fallen and partly been replaced by domestic support, whilst support for farmers in some emerging economies has grown. Against that backdrop, this paper provides new estimates of national economic impacts of global agricultural tariffs and domestic supports. Using the latest global economy-wide GTAP (Global Trade Analysis Project) model calibrated to 2017, we simulate (a) the removal of food and agricultural domestic supports and agri-food tariffs and (b) the removal also of tariffs on imports of non-agricultural goods. We find that agricultural support policies are still an important part of the global welfare cost of all goods’ trade-restrictive policies (albeit only half as costly as in 2001), and tariffs still dominate the global welfare cost of all farm-support programs. That farm support could be re-instrumented to relieve natural resource and environmental stresses, boost food and nutrition security, and alleviate poverty and income inequality.

We analyse the ‘indirect effects’ of Brexit on African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries’ exports that use the UK as a platform to access the EU market and vice versa. First, we use the EORA26 multi-region input–output database for 186 countries and 26 sectors to characterize the ACP domestic content embedded in bilateral trade between the UK and the EU. Second, we apply the GTAP-VA module to carry out a simulation of how the EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement will impinge on 121 countries and 65 products. The results suggest that while ‘indirect effects’ on ACP countries’ exports may exist, their economic magnitude is small in aggregate because ACP countries supply only small amounts of inputs used in UK–EU bilateral trade. Our simulations also show that these effects may be offset by the likely increase in ACP domestic content in exports because of TCA friction, mainly towards the UK.

The effect of trade liberalisation on the welfare of workers depends on the nature and magnitude of switching costs that workers face in moving across sectors. This paper investigates the impact of trade liberalisation on the gender wage gap in China, emphasising the role of sectoral switching costs in driving the effect. Using the local labour market approach as the identification strategy, I find that a one-standard-deviation increase in regional trade exposure is associated with a 3.2% increase in the gender wage gap during the 1992–2009 period. The emergence of the empirical pattern is mainly because the sectoral switching costs are larger for females than males. Since trade liberalisation leads to labour reallocation across sectors, the presence of asymmetric sectoral switching costs thus prevents female workers initially employed in the manufacturing sector from accessing advanced service industries, resulting in a rising gender wage gap after the trade. As a response, female manufacturing workers are forced to either be employed in low-skill service industries or exit the labour market. This paper carries strong implications for policies that both promote gender equity and help trade-displaced workers.

The trade of intermediates now accounts for a growing share of global trade. In this highly fragmented global production system, any change in tariff rates can generate a higher impact than that of initial direct tariffs. To assess the impact of tariffs on global value chain participation, this study uses value-added trade statistics and cumulative tariff rates for 12 sectors from 168 countries for the years 1990–2015. The visual inspection suggests that initial tariffs result in higher tariff rates (almost 14%) due to a knock-on impact along with supply chains. The main empirical finding is that both faced and imposed tariff rates have significant negative impacts on sectoral global value chain participation. The effect is also persistent in the analysis if we employ cumulative tariff rates. Apart from these policy determinants, sector- and country-level endowments, such as higher relative length, capital intensity, foreign direct investment stock, and human capital appear to be the major drivers for higher total, forward, and backward global value chains participation. Even if our main results are robust, there are also some distinctions in the effects of tariff rates depending on the country- and sector-level heterogeneities. In a policy-related debate, given the cascading impacts of these liberalization initiatives, autonomous, regional, and global liberalization efforts are critical for all sectors to reap the benefits from the global production system.

Drawing upon recent studies that empirically estimate both the benefits and costs of trade, this paper addresses a simple and important question: By how much do the benefits of increased global trade outweigh the costs? To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to answer this question at global and World Bank income-grouping levels using empirically estimated relationships from the trade cost literature. Using a structural gravity model, we simulate changes in three primary trade constraints: a 10% reduction in tariff levels, a 10% reduction in effective distance, and a 10% increase in free trade agreement depth. The projection leads to a roughly 5% increase in global trade by value. Our model suggests that increased trade has an incredibly high benefit–cost ratio (BCR) for the developing world with an order-of-magnitude estimate for low- and lower–middle-income countries of 100 and for upper–middle-income countries of 50. However, the BCR for high-income countries is substantially lower, with a value closer to 5. Overall, the results suggest that free trade leads to substantial net benefits globally, generating US$ 700 billion in benefits (0.83% of global GDP) and US$ 100 billion in costs (0.12% of global GDP) in the first year, a differential that grows over time. Sensitivity analyses suggest that our BCRs are on the lower end of a plausible range. The results point to the incredible value of free trade, particularly for developing countries, and reiterate the importance of considering distributional impacts when implementing trade reforms.

Another quiet revolution is taking place in the alcoholic beverage markets: a trend toward lower-alcohol and even no-alcohol beverages, especially in the world's higher-income countries. This new trend adds to the long-term consumer trend in affluent countries of substituting quality for quantity in many of their purchases (premiumization), which, in the case of alcoholic beverages, has been driven largely by a desire for a healthier lifestyle. More-affluent consumers also desire a greater variety than is typically available from large producers of regular products, which has led to a craft beverage revolution. Both desires—for lower-alcohol beverages and a greater variety of quality offerings—are driving this so-called low- or no-alcohol revolution. The trend is just beginning to show up in wine (and spirits) markets, but it began developing much earlier in beer markets. The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent of the latter and the consumer forces behind it. Since Australian brewers are leading the way globally in building various Lo-No beer categories, and thereby contributing substantially to lowering that nation's alcohol consumption, its trends are highlighted and compared with global trends. The paper concludes by drawing out lessons and prospects for lower-alcohol beer and wine.

Our article presents an empirical investigation of the relationship between the export performance of Italian provinces and the quality of their local institutions, specifically the rule of law, over the period 2004–2016. According to the results obtained by different econometric approaches (OLS, FE, SYS-GMM), in general a secure and well-defined legal framework – by reducing transaction costs and uncertainty, facilitating capital accumulation and an increase in the firms' scale of production – is associated with better export performance. Interestingly, when the analysis is replicated at the level of the Italian macro-areas (North, Centre and South), the results indicate that the rule of law has a statistically significant and positive association with export performance only in northern provinces, thus suggesting that the effectiveness of this institutional dimension might depend on the level of development of the socioeconomic and institutional features at the local level, i.e. only when a set of suitable economic incentive mechanisms are already in place.

This study uses gravity models to explain bilateral patterns of global wine trade since 1962. This is, to our knowledge, the first study on global wine trade covering the second wave of globalization as a whole. The results suggest that the impact of distance, common language, and common colonizer post-1945 on wine trade was lower in the 1991–2019 period than in the 1962–1990 period. We also use gravity models to explain the impact on bilateral wine trade patterns of similarities across countries in the mix of winegrape varieties in their vineyards. Although our models do not allow us to identify causality, the results suggest that countries trade more wine with each other the closer their mix of winegrape varieties.

We investigate tax fraud in a major export-promotion program in India – the Duty Drawback scheme – which enables exporting firms to claim a cash rebate proportional to the value of their exports, at a product-specific drawback rate. We detect fraud based on two approaches. First, we show that bilateral trade asymmetries between reported exports by India and reported imports by trading partners of the same trade flows are systematically correlated with the rate of drawback, suggesting that exporting firms over-report exports to unduly gain duty drawback. Second, we find evidence of excess bunching in the distribution of unit values reported by India at kinks in the per-unit drawback schedule, relative to the distribution of unit values reported by importing countries. Our results suggest that fraud currently detected by customs represents only 3.8%–6% of actual fraud.

Global agro-food trade grew strongly during the first globalisation. The increase in demand, the fall in trade costs, liberal policies and technological advances explain this expansion in trade. Within this context, this study analyses the formation and evolution of the international market of a special product: meat. It is a peculiar product because it is perishable. Furthermore, it is important to point out that the increase in its trade was based mostly on the strong demand in the United Kingdom, which acquired an almost monopsonist position, and also on the diffusion of mechanical refrigeration. This enabled the countries of the Río de la Plata, particularly Argentina, together with Australia and New Zealand to become world leaders in meat exports.

A proposal to reform the United Kingdom's excise duty on alcohol is under consideration during 2022. The proposal would change the tax base from volume of product to volume of alcohol, which would see a fall in the tax on sparkling wine (by about one-fifth), a rise in the tax on fortified wines of 18% alcohol by volume (ABV) (by about one-sixth), and table wines with more (less) than 11.5% ABV would become dearer (cheaper). With taxes on most beers unchanged and taxes on spirits lowered slightly, the pattern of UK wine consumption and imports would alter considerably. This article draws on a global model of national alcoholic beverage markets to estimate the likely bilateral trade effects of this proposed reform to UK excise duties. It compares them with the trade effects of the United Kingdom's first two bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs), following the post-Brexit EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, which allows Australian and New Zealand vignerons tariff-free access to the UK wine market. Those two FTAs are estimated to cause the United Kingdom to import far more wine than is lost by the proposed changes in UK excise duties.

Did trade patterns in services change into activities that were more digital-intense after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008, and was this shift structural? This paper uses a Difference-in-Difference (DID) approach to investigate whether services trade became more digital-based after the GFC in 2008. It finds support that the GFC formed a break from the previous period that caused services trade to become more digital – although there are signs that this had already started before 2008. Countries with high internet usage and a comparative advantage in digital-intense services, such as R&D, information exchange, computer services, and charges for Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), on average saw post-GFC a 6% increase in global exports compared to other non-digital sectors. More striking is that upper-middle income countries and countries with medium levels of skills also witnessed a sharp increase. These significant outcomes may indicate the direction into which patterns of services trade are likely to turn after the current economic crisis resulting from COVID-19.

We present evidence that international trade may exacerbate the initial unequal distribution of hydric resources. This result is driven by the fact that countries exporting agricultural goods are relatively abundant (with respect to capital) in the combined availability of water and arable land but, in absolute terms, scarce in capital and not richer in water in comparison to more developed ones. Due to both the scarcity of capital and the lower relative price of natural resources with respect to capital, the total value of production in these developing countries is modest, implying that international trade can lead to a less even distribution of the water content of consumption. Policies sustaining water prices and, more generally, those of natural resources (or lower capital costs) may contribute to offsetting this effect and allow for trade to play a positive role in reducing the uneven distribution of water endowments.

Legitimate reasons for the imposition of non-tariff measures (NTMs) within regulations have triggered their extensive use. Among these measures, technical barriers to trade (TBTs) and sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures allow countries to impose restrictions on the import of low-quality products suspected of harming domestic consumers’ health, plant life, or the environment. This paper analyses two regulative and standard-like NTMs – TBTs and SPS measures – and the quality of traded products that is driven by their imposition, which is a general underlying motive for the adoption of such regulations. A dummy variable measuring the existence of these NTMs and a count variable indicating their stringency are used in the analysis. Moreover, two other variables indicate flows of NTMs imposed in each year and stocks of these NTMs accumulated over years. The results indicate that TBTs and SPS measures do indeed imply a higher quality of traded products. Stringent TBTs with more regulations imposed in each year (i.e. flows of count TBTs) have the largest impact on the quality of traded products. However, for SPS measures, only the existence of a regulation (i.e. the dummy variable on flows of SPS measures) on a traded product has the strongest impact on its quality.

The tariff preferences in FTAs do not apply automatically to all imports. Instead, importers can request to use the tariff preferences, but must then show that the imported goods fulfil the formal requirements (e.g. rules of origin) of the FTA. This is costly, which is a likely reason why tariff preferences are not always used. This research note examines preference utilization under the FTA between the EU and South Korea, which was formally ratified in 2015 (but had been provisionally applied from 2011). We use firm and transaction level data for Swedish imports from South Korea during November 2016 to answer the question ‘Who uses the EU's FTAs?’ With information on firm size, product category, import mode (direct imports or customs warehousing), preference margin, potential duty savings, and transaction size, we provide a detailed picture of when firms choose to utilize the tariff preferences. The results suggest that the differences across importers are not primarily related to firm size, as is sometimes suggested in extant literature. We also find that it is the size of the import transaction rather than the size of the preference margin that determines preference utilization.

The European Union (EU) has been using economic sanctions both as a foreign policy tool and as a liberal alternative to military action. Since 2006, it has been implementing general sanctions against the whole economy of Iran, affecting their trade relations, and since 2007, following the imposition of sanctions by the UN Security Council, it has also been using smart sanctions targeting Iranian entities and natural persons associated with the country's military activities. In a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model, this paper investigates the impact of general and targeted EU sanctions against Iran on quarterly bilateral trade values between the 19 members of the euro area (EA19) and Iran between the first quarter of 1999 and the fourth quarter of 2018. In a robustness NARDL specification, trade between Iran and the 28 members of the EU is analysed. In addition, a gravity model of bilateral trade between Iran and the EU member states is run in a robustness check. The results indicate that the EU's general sanctions have strongly hampered trade flows between the two trading partners in almost all sectors, except for the primary sectors. Furthermore, our study finds that the impact of smart sanctions targeting Iranian entities and natural persons is much smaller than the impact of general sanctions on total trade values and the trade values of many sectors. Smart sanctions affect the exports of most sectors from the EA19 and the EU28 to Iran, while they are statistically insignificant for the imports of many sectors from Iran. Thus, this paper provides evidence of the motivations behind smart sanctions, which target specific individuals and entities rather than the whole economy, unlike general sanctions, which have a negative impact on ordinary people.