EXPORTS FROM POOREST DEVELOPING COUNTRIES TO THE U.S.A. AND THE EFFECTS OF U.S. PREFERENCES: AN EMPIRICAL EVALUATION (UNITED STATES)

This thesis has two basic objectives. Firstly, it provides an expost evaluation of the short-term effects of the U.S. GSP scheme on exports from a sample of 49 beneficiary less developed countries (LDCs) classified as Poorest. Secondly, it provides an evaluation of the importance, in the determination of the trade flows under consideration, of the following factors: (1) transportation costs and psychic distance; (2) U.S. total demand for imports; (3) the degree of economic development in the exporting country; (4) the size of the domestic market in the exporting country; and (5) exporting country government policy with respect to trade.;Our results show that the supply side factors play a consistently positive and generally highly significant role in the determination of the South-North trade flows in manufactures under consideration. Moreover, while per capita income and population tend to be more important for the poorest countries in our sample (African countries), the reverse tends to be true for government policy. The correlation with respect to distance is generally as expected while the results obtained for U.S. GNP are generally perverse, i.e., generally negative. However, the analysis carried out separately on geographical subgroups suggests that the U.S. GNP tends to have a negative effect on African exports, no effect on Asian exports and a positive effect on Latin American exports. Our results also suggest that, while it does not seem to have been effective across our sample of 49 countries taken together, the U.S. GSP scheme may have had a positive impact on Asian exports of manufactures.;Our empirical investigation involves the application of pooled time series analysis, using ordinary least squares, to a modified Gravity model stipulating the flow of trade as a function of supply, demand and resistance factors. Exporting country per capita income, population size and government policy orientation represent the supply side. U.S. GNP and the geographical distances between the U.S.A. and the various exporting countries define the demand side and resistance factor respectively. U.S. GSP coverage enters the model through the specification of a GSP dummy (or GSP dummies). Our investigation covers the 1971-1979 period.