Essays on administrative protection and trade deflection

This dissertation analyzes the trading effects and the politics of antidumping. The first essay empirically examines the influence of partisanship on antidumping. I show that an increase in the leftist orientation of the government makes labor intensive industries less likely to file an antidumping petition. I also demonstrate that the increase in the leftist orientation of the government is associated with an increase in the likelihood of an affirmative antidumping outcome for the petitions of labor intensive industries. The second essay investigates the effect of past exporting relationships of the firms, whose products are targeted by antidumping duties, on their export flows to alternative markets. My estimations show that facing an antidumping duty on a product leads to a 18% increase in the exports of the firm for that product to the alternative countries where the firms previously exported the same product and a 8% increase to the countries where the firms exported another product. On the contrary, I fail to find a significant effect of antidumping duties on the exports of the particular product to third countries to which the firm did not export before. Further, I show that a firm’s probability to start exporting the duty imposed product in a different destination increases by 8–10% if the firm already exported another product to that destination. However, I find no such evidence for the countries to which the firm did not export before. The third essay empirically analyzes the effect of potential antidumping claims, resulting from an antidumping investigation in the domestic market, on the quality of exported products to the target countries. My findings suggest that retaliation threats increase the quality of firms’ shipments for the named industries’ products to the target countries by 11%. This effect is also significantly increasing in the share of the exports of the named industries’ products shipped to the target country in the firms’ total exports. Further, I show that this effect is 4% higher for the exporters serving the developed countries and 3% higher for ones serving the heavy antidumping users.

Closing the productivity gap and trade *policy

The relationship between trade policy and productivity growth is regarded as ambiguous in the literature. This dissertation examines under what condition the relationship would be positive (or negative). Through the use of static and dynamic analysis, we find two conflicting effects (the pro-protection effect and the pro-competitive effect) that cause the relationship to be ambiguous. If there exists a productivity gap between the import-competing and foreign industries, and if the level of protection is low (high), the relationship is positive (negative). We also show that the import-competing firm responds to a change in the protection level by choosing a level of investment in innovation which yields a different rate of productivity growth. The policy implication, therefore, is that a trade-policy maker should set the trade protection at a level which induces the firm to choose the highest rate of productivity growth, and, as a result, leading the firm to close the initial productivity gap in the most efficient way. ^

Raising Cane in the 'Glades: The Global Sugar Trade and the Transformation of Florida

Over the last century, the Everglades underwent a metaphorical and ecological transition from impenetrable swamp to endangered wetland. At the heart of this transformation lies the Florida sugar industry, which by the 1990s was at the center of the political storm over the multi-billion dollar ecological “restoration” of the Everglades. Raising Cane in the ’Glades is the first study to situate the environmental transformation of the Everglades within the economic and historical geography of global sugar production and trade. Using, among other sources, interviews, government and corporate documents, and recently declassified U.S. State Department memoranda, Gail M. Hollander demonstrates that the development of Florida’s sugar region was the outcome of pitched battles reaching the highest political offices in the U.S. and in countries around the world, especially Cuba—which emerges in her narrative as a model, a competitor, and the regional “other” to Florida’s “self.” Spanning the period from the age of empire to the era of globalization, the book shows how the “sugar question”—a label nineteenth-century economists coined for intense international debates on sugar production and trade—emerges repeatedly in new guises. Hollander uses the sugar question as a thread to stitch together past and present, local and global, in explaining Everglades transformation.