Working paper

Trade Intermediation by Producers

Aksel Erbahar, and Vincent Rebeyrol

Abstract

This paper shows that manufacturing exporters export goods that they have not produced and thus also act as trade intermediaries. The geographical dimension of the data reveals that almost half of these exports of “sourced” products are purely intermediated: to many destinations, firms export sourced products only. We find that this type of intermediation is ubiquitous across firms, products, and destinations, and is robust to a battery of alternative definitions. These findings show that trade intermediation by producers (TIP) is not solely driven by carry-along trade, where produced and sourced products are bundled when exported. Our decomposition of TIP highlights that trade intermediation should be identified at the firm-product-destination level. The prevalence of pure intermediation for all manufacturing exporters, including the largest ones, suggests that intermediation plays an important role in firms’ participation and success in international markets.

Keywords

international trade; intermediaries; carry-along trade; multi-product firms;

JEL codes

  • F12: Models of Trade with Imperfect Competition and Scale Economies • Fragmentation
  • F14: Empirical Studies of Trade
  • L2: Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior

Reference

Aksel Erbahar, and Vincent Rebeyrol, Trade Intermediation by Producers, TSE Working Paper, n. 21-1265, November 2021, revised September 2022.

See also

Published in

TSE Working Paper, n. 21-1265, November 2021, revised September 2022