Comparative Advantage, Service Trade, and Global Imbalances 比较优势、服务贸易和全球失衡.pdfVIP

Cahier de recherche/Working Paper 11-34 Comparative Advantage, Service Trade, and Global Imbalances Alessandro Barattieri Octobre/October 2011 Barattieri: University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM), Economics Department and CIRPÉE Mail: UQAM, Case postale 8888, succursale Centre-Ville, Montreal (Quebec) H3C 3P8 Tel.: +1 514 987-3000 (0850#) ; Fax: 514 987-8494 barattieri.alessandro@uqam.ca I would like to thank in a special way my advisors Fabio Ghironi, James Anderson and Susanto Basu for the many insightful discussions and the constant encouragement and support. Thanks also to Marianne Baxter, Joseph W. Gruber, David Hummels, Matteo Iacoviello, Steve Kamin, Nelson Mark, and seminar participants at several institutions and conferences for useful comments and suggestions. All errors are mine. Abstract : The large current account deficit of the U.S. is the result of a large deficit in the goods balance and a modest surplus in the service balance. The opposite is true for Japan, Germany and China. Moreover, I document the emergence from the mid-nineties of a strong negative relation between specialization in export of services and current account balances in a large sample of OECD and developing countries. Starting from these new stylized facts, I propose in this paper a “service hypothesis” for global imbalances, a new explanation based on the interplay between the U.S. comparative advantage in services and the asymmetric trade liberalization process in goods trade versus service trade that took place in the last 15 years. First, I use a structural gravity model to show that service trade liberalization lagged behind goods trade liberalization, and I quantify the extent of this asymmetry. Second, I show that a simple two-period model can rationalize the emergence of current account deficits in