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Does ICT Development Flatten the Globe? Evidence from International Trade Costs Data

American Journal of Trade and Policy

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Field Value
 
Title Does ICT Development Flatten the Globe? Evidence from International Trade Costs Data
 
Creator Keita, Moussa; Consultant, CERDI, 18 rue Eugène Jumin, 75019, Paris, FRANCE
 
Subject ICT, Distance, Trade, Trade costs, infrastructure, Gravity model
 
Description This study attempts to bring new perspectives on the death of distance hypothesis by examining to what extent the intensification of ICT has contributed to attenuate the effect of distance on international trade issues. Our analysis is based on an extended gravity model constituted of 2827 country pairs observed from 2002 to 2012. The model is estimated by using the Hausman-Taylor instrumental variable approach to deal with specificities of the panel gravity models that cannot be treated in classical fixed-effect or random-effect models. The estimations confirm significant beneficial effects of ICT regarding trade costs reduction. We found that bilateral trade costs are significantly low between countries that have a more densified communication network. And this effect appears to be strongly heterogeneous regarding the distance. In particular, we found that the impact of ICT on trade costs is greater when the distance between the trading partners is more important. We also found that the elasticity of trade costs to distance decreases as the level of ICT increases. These results appear robust to various sensitivity and robustness checks and are consistent with other studies. Finally, the results obtained in this study suggest the existence of strong distance-neutralizing effect of ICT.

JEL Classifications Code: F14 ; O33
 
Publisher Asian Business Consortium
 
Contributor
 
Date 2016-02-29
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

 
Format application/pdf
 
Identifier http://journals.abc.us.org/index.php/ajtp/article/view/796
10.18034/ajtp.v2i3.796
 
Source American Journal of Trade and Policy; Vol 2, No 3 (2015): 6th Issue; 153 - 160
2313-4755
2313-4747
 
Language eng
 
Relation http://journals.abc.us.org/index.php/ajtp/article/view/796/608
 
Rights Copyright (c) 2016 Moussa Keita
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0