Export Performance and Trade Facilitation Reform: Hard and Soft Infrastructure

By Alberto Portugal-Perez, John S. Wilson. 2010

597 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We estimate the impact of aggregate indicators of “soft” and “hard” infrastructure on the export performance of developing countries. We derive four new indicators for more than 100 countries over the period 2004–07. Estimates show that trade facilitation reforms do improve the export performance of developing countries. This is particularly true with investment in physical infrastructure and regulatory reform to improve the business environment. The findings provide evidence that the marginal effect of the transport efficiency and business environment improvement on exports appears to be decreasing in per capita income. In contrast, the impact of physical infrastructure and information and communications technology on exports appears increasingly important the richer a country becomes. We also find statistical evidence on the complementarity between hard infrastructure and soft infrastructure, as captured by our indicators. Finally, drawing on estimates, we compute illustrative ad-valorem equivalents of improving each indicator halfway to the level of the top performer in the region.

Subfields: Development, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb4e4a3ad982daf5ec9c496c5458163133d42fef

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Citations in the corpus

The importance of the Logistics Performance Index in international trade (2014, methodology): “Recent research has incorporated variables representing improvements in logistics into these models (Hausman et al., 2005; Prabir, 2007; Iwanow and Kirkpatrick, 2009; Portugal-Perez and Wilson, 2010).”
Transport Policies and Development (2015, background): “…major cities would increase trade within sub-Saharan Africa by $250 billion over five years (Buys, Deichmann, & Wheeler, 2010).6 Interestingly, improving transport is found to have a greater impact on export performance when the country’s income level is lower (Portugal-Perez & Wilson, 2012).”
The impacts of port infrastructure and logistics performance on economic growth: the mediating role of seaborne trade (2018, methodology): “As none of the variables are normally distributed, the Satorra-Bentler rescaling method has been employed for SEM estimation, as suggested by Rosseel (2012). Validity and reliability statistics of the conceptual model (proposed in Section 2) are then performed.”