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Misreporting trade: Tariff evasion, corruption, and auditing standards
Author(s) -
Kellenberg Derek,
Levinson Arik
Publication year - 2019
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/roie.12363
Subject(s) - tariff , evasion (ethics) , tax evasion , audit , economics , language change , product (mathematics) , construct (python library) , international economics , international trade , aggregate (composite) , public economics , accounting , art , materials science , geometry , immune system , literature , mathematics , composite material , computer science , immunology , biology , programming language
Official international trade statistics report commerce between every pair of countries twice: once for the importing country and once for the exporter. In principle, the two values differ only by transport costs, but as has long been recognized, they also differ systematically with product‐level tariffs. We aggregate across products to construct a dataset of annual aggregate bilateral trade, separately for the importer and exporter reports. With these data, we show that the reporting differences also vary systematically with country characteristics aside from tariffs: incomes, auditing standards, corruption, and trade agreements.