آیا شوکهای وارده به قوانین و مقررات تجاری باعث ایجاد شوک در بهره وری می شود؟

International trade is frequently thought of as a production technology in which the inputs are exports and the outputs are imports. Exports are transformed into imports at the rate of the price of exports relative to the price of imports: the reciprocal of the terms of trade. Cast this way, a change in the terms of trade acts as a productivity shock. Or does it? In this paper, we show that this line of reasoning cannot work in standard models. Starting with a simple model and then generalizing, we show that changes in the terms of trade have no first-order effect on productivity when output is measured as chain-weighted real GDP. The terms of trade do affect real income and consumption in a country, and we show how measures of real income change with the terms of trade at business cycle frequencies and during financial crises.

The terms of trade—the price of imports relative to the price of exports—vary greatly over time and country. This vari- ation makes the terms of trade a natural candidate for explaining country performance. Intuitively, we can think about foreign trade as a production technology: a country’s exports are the inputs to the technology, and these inputs are turned into outputs that are recorded as a country’s imports. Export s are transformed into imports at the rate that is the ratio of the price of exports to the price of imports, which is just the reciprocal of the terms of trade. Viewed in this way, an increase in the terms of trade acts much like a technology shock: the same amount of exports now produces a smaller amount of imports