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Headquarter Services and Revealed Factor Abundance
Author(s) -
Ekholm Karolina
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
review of international economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.513
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 1467-9396
pISSN - 0965-7576
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9396.00124
Subject(s) - multinational corporation , abundance (ecology) , economics , capital (architecture) , international trade , empirical research , international economics , finance , fishery , geography , biology , statistics , mathematics , archaeology
This paper analyzes how usual measures of revealed factor abundance (RFA), based on trade in merchandise, are affected by the existence of trade in services of intangible assets; trade that is mainly associated with multinational firms. It presents empirical estimates of both usual measures of RFA and new measures that take account of trade in headquarter services for the United States, a country that has a substantial surplus in the recorded components of such trade. It is found that the usual measures underestimate the abundance of highly skilled labor and technological knowledge, and overestimate the abundance of physical capital.