出版社：Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre, Univ. Hohenheim
摘要：Recent literature has argued that, contrary to the results of a seminal paper by
Rose (2004), WTO membership does promote bilateral trade, at least for developed
economies and if membership includes non-formal compliance. We review the
literature in order to identify open issues. We then develop the simplest
possible \corner-solutions" version of the gravity model which serves as a
framework to readdress these issues. We focus on the extensive margin of trade
that separates positive-trade from zero-trade country pairs. We argue that the
model can be consistently estimated using Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood
methods with exporter and importer fixed effects. We account for coding issues
and the potential heterogeneity of the WTO membership which recent contributions
have stressed. While we find that WTO membership increases the likelihood that a
given country pair trades, we do not find that the extensive margin has a strong
and systematic effect on the average trade-creating potential of the WTO.
