Import Competition and Quality Upgrading / Mary Amiti, Amit K. Khandelwal.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Amiti, Mary.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Khandelwal, Amit K.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w15503.

NBER working paper series no. w15503

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2009.

Summary:

It is important to understand the factors that influence a country's transition from the production of low-quality to high-quality products since the production of high-quality goods is often viewed as a pre-condition for export success and, ultimately, for economic development. In this paper, we provide the first evidence that countries' import tariffs affect the rate at which they upgrade the quality of their products. We analyze the effect of import competition on quality upgrading using highly disaggregated export data to the U.S. from fifty-six countries in 10,000 products using a novel approach to measure quality. As predicted by recent distance to the frontier models, we find that lower tariffs are associated with quality upgrading for products close to the world quality frontier, whereas lower tariffs discourage quality upgrading for products distant from the frontier.

Notes:

Print version record

November 2009.