One is not enough!

Peter Bergeijk

ISS Working Papers - General Series from International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS), The Hague

Abstract: In order to put the mainstream narrative for the recent world trade collapse into a consistent economic-historic framework, this paper builds a comparable data set for the analysis of world trade collapses consisting of 72 periods of import decline (27 in the 1930s; 45 in 2008-10). The empirical analysis explains about three quarters of cross-country variance and supports the emerging professional consensus that identifies the decrease in domestic demand and the share of manufacturing trade as key determinants of the severity of a world trade collapse, but the paper also reveals significant differences between the 1930s and the 2000s. Both the demand shock and the composition effect are comparatively speaking less important in the recent trade collapse. The paper identifies country-specific determinants (level of development, political system and openness) that have not (yet) been considered in the mainstream narrative for the recent world trade collapse. In line with the theory of trade uncertainty (van Marrewijk and van Bergeijk 1993, van Bergeijk 2010), I find that more democratic, more open, and wealthier countries reduced their imports to a smaller extent.

Keywords: 1930s; 2008-2010; deglobalization; economic history; value chains; world trade collapse (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-04-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repub.eur.nl/pub/22964/wp521.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ems:euriss:22964

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISS Working Papers - General Series from International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS), The Hague Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePub ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).