TY - CEPII
A1 - Lionel Fontagné
A1 - Gianluca Orefice
A1 - Roberta Piermartini
A1 - Nadia Rocha
TI - Product Standards and Margins of Trade: Firm Level Evidence
IS - 2013-06
T3 - Working Papers
KW - International trade
KW - firm heterogeneity
KW - multi-product exporters
KW - non-tariff barriers
N2 - This paper analyses the trade effects of restrictive product standards on the margins of trade for a large panel of French firms. To focus on restrictive product standards only, we use a new database compiling the list of measures that have been raised as concerns in dedicated committees of the WTO. We restrict our analysis to the subset of Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) regulatory measures and analyse the effects of product standards on three variables: (i) probability to export and to exit the export market (firm-product extensive margins), (ii) value exported (firm-product intensive margin) and (iii) export prices. In particular we study whether firms size, market shares and export orientation modify the effect of SPS measures. We find that SPS measures discourage exports. We also find a negative effect of SPS imposition on the intensive margins of trade. Finally, the negative effects of SPS measures on the extensive and intensive margins of trade are attenuated for big firms.
ER -