Exploring new Internet measurements on international trade and global human resources
ISSN: 0144-3585
Article publication date: 14 July 2020
Issue publication date: 2 February 2021
Abstract
Purpose
We address the question of how the Internet promotes international trade volume, and especially, whether the global human resources affect the bilateral international trade during the technology development across countries.
Design/methodology/approach
A dynamic panel causality analysis is carried out to demonstrate empirically that the causality of the Internet diffusion on the international trade volumes. Evidence shows a significant positive effect of the Internet on international trade volume from time-series and cross-sectional regressions. Furthermore, the magnitude of elasticity is discussed.
Findings
There is strong evidence that the Internet stimulates international trade for all countries. Growth of trade volumes changes over time with heteroscedastic responses. The positive impacts of the growth of GDP are diluted by the growth of global human resources.
Originality/value
The data on the number of web hosts is not necessarily correlated to where the site is actually located. We contribute to the new Internet measurement which helps to explain the information transferring that stimulates the international trade and examine the global human resources.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation grant SES070006T. This paper is a beneficiary of TeraGrid Network and its partners, such as SDSC, PSC, and the project-system helpdesk from UIUC. Especially, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) gives us the most support for running on the Pople, Rachel system. We truly thank the computational discussion from Yang Wang, Ken Hackworth, and Sergiu Sanielevici. We are grateful to Shane Greenstein for numerous helpful discussions.
Citation
Swan, T.T., Swan, B.Q. and Zhang, Z.(J). (2021), "Exploring new Internet measurements on international trade and global human resources", Journal of Economic Studies, Vol. 48 No. 2, pp. 428-448. https://doi.org/10.1108/JES-07-2019-0331
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited