Quality And The Great Trade Collapse

Download or read book Quality and the Great Trade Collapse written by Natalie Chen and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2016-02-18 with total page 59 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We explore whether the global financial crisis has had heterogeneous effects on traded goods differentiated by quality. Combining a dataset of Argentinean firm-level destination-specific wine exports with quality ratings, we show that higher quality exports grew faster before the crisis, but this trend reversed during the recession. Quantitatively, the effect is large: up to nine percentage points difference in trade performance can be explained by the quality composition of exports. This flight from quality was triggered by a fall in aggregate demand, was more acute when households could substitute imports by domestic alternatives, and was stronger for smaller firms' exports.