Efeito da Internet sobre o comércio internacional

Abstract

The transformations in international trade have generated greater productive and commercial integration between countries, inclusion of economies in specialized market niches, expansion of the scale of production, economies of scale for international companies and fragmentation of the chains of supplements or intermediate inputs. Within this scenario, the emergence of the Internet from the 90s, together with the spread of globalization, propelled the spread of ICTs in sectors and nations, which can provide a greater flow of information to interrupt barriers to entry to the market, with decrease in costs linked to trade. This research is aimed at contributing to this gap by examining the effect of the Internet in international trade considering a group of countries in different stages of development, for the period from 2000 to 2016. More specifically, this study addresses the penetration of the Internet as an instrument to reduce trade barriers, along with the technological evolution of telecommunications. The hypothesis is that the penetration of the Internet, together with the technological evolution of telecommunications, positively influences the trade flows, reducing the effect of trade barriers between countries, whether related to linguistic, cultural or informational distance. The main findings revealed that for the aggregate trade flows estimated via PPML, when doubling as broadband subscription networks between pairs of countries, ceteris paribus, would cause an increase of 0.70% in the trade flows between them. For the primary sector, the same shock would result in an increase of 5.30% in the trade flows. Shocks in relation to the expansion of broadband networks are not dependent on any type of historical or political relationship between countries, requiring only the country's willingness to expand its Internet networks. The trade gain evidenced in the shock points to a possible instrument for countries dependent on exports of goods belonging to the primary sector (mostly homogeneous goods). Geographical distance, a proxy for all trade costs, delivers evidence that has lesser effects on the trade flows of manufactured goods, thanks to technological adoption and productive fragmentation, when compared to large sectors of agriculture, energy and mining, intensive in homogeneous goods.