Years back, a friend of mine at Stanford was making headlines for months by claiming that trade agreements were a bad thing for
international trade.
At the same time, I was claiming that it was the abysmal
state of logistics in large countries such as India and China that was holding
back container penetration and thus international trade growth.
The World Bank
seems to agree to this. In addition to the usual culprits of trade destruction,
such as product standards in importing countries and other non-tariff barriers
to trade, the WB now finds that, since the 2009 economic meltdown, the size of
exporting firms in developing countries has gone down.
Apparently, as I had been
claiming, the smaller the size of producers, and the larger the size of the
country, the more difficult it is to organize export logistics in a system
based on containerization and hub-and-spoke consolidation and distribution. HH
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