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GTAP Resources: Resource Display

GTAP Resource #1687

"Trade Liberalization and Regional Inequality: Do Transportation Costs Impose a Spatial Poverty Trap? "
by Haddad, Eduardo and Fernando Perobelli


Abstract
In this paper, we focus on the regional (intra-national) impacts of barriers to trade, in the form of tariffs, in a national economy. More specifically, we are concerned with the spatial impediments for the internal transmission of the
potential benefits of trade liberalization, in the form of high transportation costs that the more remote regions face. A cost-competitiveness approach, based on relative changes in the sectoral and regional cost and demand structures, is adopted to isolate the likely spatial effects of further tariff reductions in Brazil. It tackles the three basis for the analytical framework proposed in the
literature: comparative advantage is grasped through the use of differential
regional production technologies; geographical advantage is verified through the explicit modeling of the transportation services and the costs of moving products based on origin-destination pairs, as well as increasing returns associated to agglomeration economies; and cumulative causation appears through
the operation of internal and external multipliers and interregional spillover
effects in comparative-static experiments. The strategy adopted in this research utilizes an interregional (bottom-up) computable general equilibrium (ICGE) model integrated to a geo-coded transportation model to evaluate shifts in the economic center of gravity and regional specialization in the Brazilian economy due to further liberal tariff policies. Counter-factual experiments focusing on the role of transportation costs within specific import-export corridors are also carried out.


Resource Details (Export Citation) GTAP Keywords
Category: 2005 Conference Paper
Status: Published
By/In: Presented at the 8th Annual Conference on Global Economic Analysis, Lübeck, Germany
Date: 2005
Version: Version for discussion
Created: Haddad, E. (4/24/2005)
Updated: Haddad, E. (4/24/2005)
Visits: 1,657
No keywords have been specified.


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