October 7, 2013, 3:57 pm 30 Comments Trends in Interregional and International Trade Well, I’ve just paid my first personal price for the shutdown; I’m trying to finish a paper for the Walter Isard memorial volume, and discovered that the International Trade Commission’s invaluable Dataweb is shut down. I know, people are missing essential medical care and more, and I’m complaining about a slight academic inconvenience. But it’s a symptom. For some reason, however, the Department of Transportation’s Freight Analysis Framework is still up and running (I was led there by a new project on metropolitan trade at Brookings, of which I’ll have much more to say in the months ahead.) So I was able to do at least one calculation on my theme, the changing fortunes of international and interregional trade. You see, FAF lets us calculate total export and domestic shipments from, and import shipments to, each state for selected years; the values are given in 2007 dollars. In particular, we can measure the growth of each flow from 1997 to 2011, which covers much though not all of the era of “hyperglobalization.” And here’s what I get for percentage changes from 1997-2011: Exports: 46.5 Imports: 108.7 Total trade (exports plus imports): 81.2 Domestic shipments: 25.6 Real GDP: 36.6 I think this makes sense: the forces behind hyperglobalization — reduced transportation and communication costs leading to vertical disintegration of production — are encouraging mainly long-range trade to save a few percent on labor costs, not shipping stuff between U.S. cities. Interregional trade seems even to be lagging GDP, possibly because our cities are becoming less specialized than they used to be.(What does Atlanta do for a living, exactly?) Anyway, I’m finding this interesting. It says that what’s going on is a lot more differentiated than the simple notion that distance is being abolished.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 18:18:04 +0000