Abstract

Existing research generally finds weak positive effects of aid for trade (AfT) on aggregate merchandise trade of recipients once endogeneity in the AfT-trade relationship is accounted for. In this paper, we confirm weak findings for both aggregate merchandise and services trade of recipients, using GMM and IV estimations. Moreover, estimates lose statistical significance if non-AfT explanatory variables are treated as endogenous in estimation suggesting identification issues may not have been adequately addressed in extant work. We then examine an alternative proposition: that effects of AfT and different categories of AfT may be observed along the conditional distributions of exports and imports. Our findings confirm this hypothesis. AfT allocated to economic infrastructure, productive capacity building in services and trade policies and regulation is more effective for smaller trading economies, especially in services. We also observe considerable heterogeneity in the trade effects of AfT allocated to individual services sectors, indicating the importance of country-specific diagnostics in targeting AfT allocation.

摘要

现有研究通常发现，一旦考虑到 AfT 贸易关系中的内生性，贸易援助 (AfT) 对受援国商品贸易总额的积极影响微弱。在本文中，我们使用 GMM 和 IV 估计确认了接收者的商品和服务贸易总量的弱发现。此外，如果在估计中将非 AfT 解释变量视为内生变量，则估计会失去统计意义，这表明识别问题在现有工作中可能没有得到充分解决。然后，我们研究了一个替代命题：可以在出口和进口的条件分布中观察到 AfT 和不同类别的 AfT 的影响。我们的发现证实了这一假设。分配给经济基础设施的 AfT，服务业和贸易政策和监管方面的生产能力建设对于较小的贸易经济体，尤其是服务业，更为有效。我们还观察到分配给各个服务部门的 AfT 的贸易影响存在相当大的异质性，这表明特定国家诊断在针对 AfT 分配方面的重要性。