Trade Costs and Intra-Industry Trade

Formal economic modeling of intra-industry trade ignores transportation or, more broadly, trade costs. Yet, as Anderson and van Wincoop (2004) suggest, trade costs are quite large. This paper extends work by Bergstrand (1990) that addressed intra-industry trade in the explicit presence of trade costs. In the context of a Helpman–Krugman-cum-trade-costs model, we derive four empirically testable hypotheses regarding intra-industry trade and trade costs. These hypotheses are investigated empirically using a cross-section of bilateral OECD Grubel–Lloyd indexes. The results are strongly in accordance with the hypotheses, indicating the importance of a more rigorous and systematic treatment of trade costs in the intra-industry trade literature.