TY  - JOUR
AU  - Feenstra,Robert C.
AU  - Rose,Andrew K.
TI  - Putting Things in Order: Patterns of Trade Dynamics and Growth
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5975
PY  - 1997
Y2  - March 1997
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5975
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5975.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Robert C. Feenstra
Department of Economics
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA  95616
Tel: 530/752-7022
Fax: 530/752-9382
E-Mail: rcfeenstra@ucdavis.edu

Andrew K. Rose
Haas School of Business Administration
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-1900
Tel: 510/642-6609
Fax: 510/642-4700
E-Mail: arose@haas.berkeley.edu
AB  - We develop a procedure to rank-order countries and commodities using dis-aggregated American imports data.  We find strong evidence that both countries and commodities can be ranked, consistent with the  product cycle' hypothesis.  Countries habitually begin to export goods to the United States according to an ordering; goods are also exported in order.  We estimate these orderings using a semi-parametric methodology which takes account of the fact that most goods are not exported by most countries in our sample.  Our orderings seem sensible, robust and intuitive.  For instance, our country rankings derived from dis-aggregated trade data turn out to be highly correlated with macroeconomic phenomena such as national productivity levels and growth rates.
ER  -