کیفیت صادرات و توزیع درآمد در یک اقتصاد وابسته کوچک

This paper provides a simple general equilibrium structure to analyze the two-way causation between choice of export quality by a small open economy and domestic income distribution. The important policy conclusion of our analysis is the following: When direct quality regulations are costly to impose or may not have desirable consequences for income distribution, the target level of export quality may be met through appropriate direct and indirect income redistribution policies such as wage policies or standard trade policies.

A major recent concern of policymakers of those LDCs adopting outward-oriented development strategies is the frequent poor quality of their exports. With foreign buyers becoming increasingly sensitive to this issue, poor qualities are limiting the extent to which these countries can develop export markets. This has serious implications for import-dependent domestic production and full utilization of abundant factors in the face of factor market rigidities. The major explanation of this low-quality phenomena that has been put forward in the literature emphasizes informational externality. When product quality is not directly observable, foreign buyers associate quality of any import item with its country of origin and are willing to pay a price equal to their perceptions, based on some exogenous information, about average quality of that country of origin. This results in the well-known Lemons Effect (Akerlof (1970)) whereby LDC exporters would choose suboptimal qualities. Under such circumstances, Chiang and Masson (1987) and Donnenfeld and Mayer (1987) have demonstrated that policies such as restrictions on the number of LDC producers or voluntary export restraints may improve export quality.1

In this paper, we have analyzed the choice of export quality by profit-maximizing producers in a small open economy. With higher-quality varieties intensive in scarce physical capital, which is also used in other sectors of the economy, such a quality choice is essentially affected by the market-clearing condition for nontradeables. This has some far-reaching implications: (1) On the one hand, any income redistribution policy favouring unskilled workers improves export quality by reducing the rate of return to capital. Minimum wage restriction and input tariff reduction are examples of such policies. Liberalization of domestic capital market has similar effects. (2) On the other hand, any improvement in quality either as a direct consequence of minimum quality requirement or as a consequence of an increase in foreign sensitivity to higher quality affects income distribution (or employment of unskilled workers) as some capital is withdrawn from the (T,N) nugget. In particular, a minimum quality restriction on exports lowers both unskilled and skilled wage rates. When the former is institutionally given, aggregate employment shrinks. This indicates a trade-off between higher export quality and greater employment.