On the Measurement of Product Variety in Trade

Product variety plays an important role in the theoretical work on monopolistic competition and trade, and recent empirical work has begun to quantify this for aggregate and disaggregate import demands. The authors discuss the measurement of produc...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Feenstra, Robert, Looi Kee, Hiau
Format: Policy Research Working Paper
Language:English
en_US
Published: 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2004/02/3909115/measurement-product-variety-trade
http://hdl.handle.net/10986/14309
Description
Summary:Product variety plays an important role in the theoretical work on monopolistic competition and trade, and recent empirical work has begun to quantify this for aggregate and disaggregate import demands. The authors discuss the measurement of product variety in trade, using a broad cross-section of industrial and developing countries and disaggregating across sectors. The authors calculate the export variety of countries in their sales to the United States, and relate the export variety indexes to country productivities. They confirm that countries with greater product variety in exports also have higher productivity. This may be due to their development of and access to these products.