Trade Facilitation and Country Size
It is argued that compared with large countries, small countries rely more on trade and therefore they are more likely to adopt liberal trading policies. The present paper extends this idea beyond the conventional trade openness measures by analyzi...
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2014
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/11/18490788/trade-facilitation-country-size http://hdl.handle.net/10986/16922 |
| Summary: | It is argued that compared with large
countries, small countries rely more on trade and therefore
they are more likely to adopt liberal trading policies. The
present paper extends this idea beyond the conventional
trade openness measures by analyzing the relationship
between country size and the number of documents required to
export and import, a measure of trade facilitation. Three
important results follow. First, trade facilitation does
improve as country size becomes smaller; that is, small
countries perform better than large countries in terms of
trade facilitation. Second, the relationship between country
size and trade facilitation is nonlinear, much stronger for
the relatively small than the large countries. Third,
contrary to what existing studies might suggest, the
relationship between country size and trade facilitation
does not appear to be driven by the fact that small
countries trade more as a proportion of their gross domestic
product than the large countries. |
|---|