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Latent Multilateral Trade Resistance Indices: Theory and Evidence
Author(s) -
Koch Wilfried,
LeSage James P.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
scottish journal of political economy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.4
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1467-9485
pISSN - 0036-9292
DOI - 10.1111/sjpe.12074
Subject(s) - economics , gravity equation , resistance (ecology) , argument (complex analysis) , econometrics , bayesian probability , mathematical economics , mathematics , bilateral trade , statistics , law , political science , ecology , biochemistry , chemistry , biology , china
Anderson and van Wincoop ( American Economic Review (2003), 69 :106) make a convincing argument that traditional gravity equation estimates are biased by the omission of multilateral resistance terms. They show that these multilateral resistance terms are implicitly defined by a system of non‐linear equations involving all regions' GDP shares and a global interdependence structure involving trade costs. We show how linearizing the system of non‐linear relationships around a free trade world leads to an interdependence structure that can be used as a Bayesian prior to produce statistical estimates of the inward and outward multilateral resistance indices. This reflects a statistical approach that has advantages over the non‐stochastic numerical approach used by Anderson and van Wincoop (2003) to solve for these indices.