Infrastructure and Trade

Developing an Information Infrastructure for International Trade

Regulators in international trade are facing a difficult challenge of increasing control and security while lowering the administrative burden for traders. The European Commission has introduced the concept of “trusted traders”: certified traders that are in control of their business. Trusted traders are entitled to trade facilitations, faster border crossing, and fewer physical inspections. To...

Taxation, Infrastructure, and Endogenous Trade Costs in New Economic Geography

This paper presents a New Economic Geography model with distortionary taxation and endogenized trade costs. Tax revenues finance a public good, infrastructure. We show that the introduction of costly public investment in infrastructure increases agglomerative tendencies. With respect to the regions’ sizes, in the periphery, the price-index for manufacturing goods decreases, whereas for the core...

Trade Liberalization, Infrastructure and Industrial Performance in Cameroon

Using pre-and post-reform industry-level panel and aggregate national infrastructure data, this paper examines the effects of infrastructure on industry productivity in Cameroon, controlling for trade variable and correcting for the likely endogeneity of infrastructure and other regressors. The empirical strategy involves, (i) estimation of production functions augmented by the infrastructure q...

Trade and the Spatial Distribution of Transport Infrastructure∗

This paper constructs a theoretical model, in which transportation costs between two locations depend on cumulative infrastructure investment and governments allocate infrastructure spending over continuous space, thereby affecting the geographical pattern of transportation costs. Modelling international trade, we assume that governments set their infrastructure investment schedules in a non-co...

Transport Infrastructure and Trade Facilitation in the Greater Mekong Subregion