American Economic Review Vol. 94 No. 2 2004
On the Measurement of Product Variety in Trade
Abstract
Bank for providing research funding and support. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Non-Technical 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 objective of this paper is to discuss the measurement of product variety in trade, using a broad cross-section of advanced and developing countries and disaggregating across sectors. We calculate the export variety of countries in their sales to the United States, and relate the export variety indexes to country productivities. We confirm that countries with greater product variety in exports also have higher productivity. This may be due to their own development of, and access to, these products. 2 1.
- DOI
- 10.1257/0002828041301524
- Volume
- 94
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 145-149
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref