Competitiveness and interregional as well as international trade: The case of Catalonia

Abstract

Recent years have seen a surge of interest among industrial organization economists in using data on international trade flows as windows into competitiveness. For countries that are at least mid sized (e g., Spain), interregional trade tends to be as large as or significantly larger than international trade. The case of Catalonia, a Spanish region, illustrates how ignoring interregional flows can lead to erroneous inferences about a region's external competitiveness. Accounting for Catalonia's interregional as well as international flows shifts what is generally assessed to be a chronic trade deficit in goods into a surplus and changes diagnoses of which Catalan sectors generate external surpluses and who its key trading partners are. We also use a gravity model approach to estimate international border effects for Catalonia.