Qualidade e seus efeitos nas margens extensiva e intensiva de comércio internacional

Abstract

Products quality is a determinant of direction to bilateral trade flows, having a central role regarding trade barriers which affects both intensive margin and extensive margin. The great challange of the literature consists in the fact that products quality are not observable, so it needs to be estimated. Using data of the bilateral flows of Brazil exports from 1996 to 2008, the objective of this article was to analise the impact of fixed and variable costs on the bilateral flows of trade through a gravity model for international trade. Despite the fixed costs, the model predicts that the effect of the distance is lower for products with higher quality, where at the margin those reduce. Additionally, the variable costs reduces the commerce while the effect is positive when associated with higher quality products. The results of the article corroborate what is expected from the literature, where the interaction terms between quality and distance aswell tariffs are positive for the bilateral flows and the quality indicator shows that the mean of quality maintain constant through the time analised.