A Further Investigation of Product Specialization in International Trade

According to the two empirical observations about U.S. imports, endowments-driven ‘within-product specialization’ has been increasing. From the data analysis, both these observations are shown extending to the imports of Brazil, India and Japan. However, in this paper, our finding is focused on that two factors driving the classical observations. First, China is the dominant low-wage exporter of multiple-sourced products. Second, the most developed countries remain the primary exporters of multiple-sourced products. When China is deleted from the U.S. import data, there is no trend in across-product specialization; also, rich exporters are increasing their trade share of multiple-sourced products. This paper builds on the method pioneered by Schott. Since without consideration of China data has no theoretical justification, these results should be viewed as a way of deepening our understanding of Schott's his empirical results.