South African exports under AGOA
Descriptive Trade Analysis
The least glamorous method here, and the one that did most of the work.
This means interrogating the raw trade data directly. How much a country trades, in what, and with whom, plotted over time. No model, no simulation, and no assumptions beyond the accuracy of the customs records.
It is badly undervalued. A great deal of confident argument about trade policy turns out, on inspection, to be inconsistent with the trade data itself, and you do not need an estimator to notice that. You need to look.
The AGOA work used trade data at the most disaggregated level available, which describes products far more precisely than the sector names that policy arguments are usually conducted in.
What it cannot do
It describes and it does not explain. It will show you that a flow rose, and it cannot tell you whether the preference caused it, the exchange rate caused it, or one firm opened a plant. For that you need either a model or a great deal of context, and the honest move is to say which one you are relying on.
Further reading
- WTO and UNCTAD (2012). A Practical Guide to Trade Policy Analysis. free Read it.Chapters 1 and 2 cover what trade data can and cannot tell you on its own.
From An analysis of South Africa exports to the United States under the African Growth Opportunity Act, MCom in Management Practice (Trade Law and Policy), University of Cape Town, 2015. Read it in OpenUCT.