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Trade Partners (trade + partner)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting80%

Selected Abstracts

The Implications of Trade Credit for Bank Monitoring: Suggestive Evidence from Japan

JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY, Issue 2 2008
Yoshiro Miwa
Firms in modern developed economies borrow from both banks and trade partners. Using Japanese manufacturing data from the 1960s, we estimate the price of trade credit, and explore some of the ways firms choose between the credit and bank loans. We find that firms of all sizes borrow heavily from their trade partners, and at implicit rates that track the explicit rates banks would charge. They borrow from banks when they anticipate needing money for relatively long periods; they turn to trade partners when they face short-term unexpected exigencies. This apparent contrast in the term structures follows, we suggest, from the fundamentally different way bankers and trade partners cut default risk. Because bankers seldom know their borrowers' industries first hand, they rely on formal legal protection (like security interests). Because trade partners know the industry well, they reduce risk by monitoring their borrowers closely instead. Because the costs to creating legal mechanisms are heavily front-loaded, bankers focus on long-term debt; because the costs of monitoring debtors are ongoing, trade creditors do not. Apparently, banks monitor less than we have thought. [source]

Parallel imports and price controls

THE RAND JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS, Issue 2 2008
Gene M. Grossman
Price controls create opportunities for international arbitrage. Many have argued that such arbitrage, if tolerated, will undermine intellectual property rights and dull the incentives for investment in research-intensive industries such as pharmaceuticals. We challenge this orthodox view and show, to the contrary, that the pace of innovation often is faster in a world with international exhaustion of intellectual property rights than in one with national exhaustion. The key to our conclusion is to recognize that governments will make different choices of price controls when parallel imports are allowed by their trade partners than they will when they are not. [source]

The ,Enfant Terrible': Australia and the Reconstruction of the Multilateral Trade system, 1946,8

AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 1 2000
Ann Capling
In recent years Australia has been recognized as a prominent player in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Less well known is Australia's activism during the establishment of the GATT. This article, based on archival sources and contemporary accounts, examines Australia's role in the birth of the multilateral trade system. It seeks to nuance the two conventional interpretations of this period, the first which argues that countries joined the GATT because it was in their economic interests to do so, and the second which suggests that the United States hegemony imposed its trade liberalization objectives on less powerful allies and trade partners. [source]

TRADE OPENNESS: AN AUSTRALIAN PERSPECTIVE

AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC PAPERS, Issue 3 2006
SIMON GUTTMANN
Australia's external trade is relatively low compared with the size of its economy. Indeed, Australia's openness ratio (exports plus imports as a proportion of GDP) in 2002 was the third-lowest among the 30 OECD countries. This paper seeks to understand Australia's low openness by analysing the empirical determinants of aggregate country trade. We present an equation for country openness which explains a substantial amount of the cross-country variation. The most important explanators of openness are population and a measure of distance to potential trade partners. Countries with larger populations trade less, as do countries that are relatively more remote. Furthermore, after controlling for trade policy there is little evidence of a positive correlation between openness and economic development. The openness equation suggests that Australia's level of trade is relatively close to what would be expected. The most important factors in explaining Australia's low openness ratio are its large geographic size and distance to the rest of the world. [source]

Political Economy of the Asia-Pacific Free Trade Area: A Dilemma for China

CHINA AND WORLD ECONOMY, Issue 5 2007
Bin Sheng
F53; F59; O53 Abstract The Asia-Pacific Free Trade Area (FTAAP) has become a topic of focus since the proposal was first raised in 2004. The present paper considers China's policy towards the FTAAP from a political economy perspective by probing the gains, impediments and concerns for China, and makes judgments based on several possible scenarios. The author argues that from an economic perspective, China would benefit from joining the FTAAP both in a static and a dynamic manner because both its main trade partners and trade barriers in export markets are concentrated in the Asia-Pacific region. However, whether the Chinese Government is likely to support the initiative is largely dependent on certain crucial political and diplomatic elements, including the APEC approach, US-Chinese relations, quality of treaty, sensitive sectors, competitive proposal of alternative and membership of Chinese Taipei. Therefore, if the Chinese Government cannot ratify the ideology and terms of the initiative, or issues that are central to China's interests are not addressed, the FTAAP will only remain a proposal possessing economic possibility in the long run, without political feasibility in the near term. [source]