IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/9079.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Markups, Market Imperfections, and Trade Openness : Evidence from Ghana

Author

Listed:
  • Damoah,Kaku Attah

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of Ghana's World Trade Organization (WTO) accession on firm-level product and labor market imperfections. The paper exploits a rich dataset of firm-level information to estimate both markups and the degree of monopsony power enjoyed by manufacturing firms. The results indicate that price-cost margins declined while the degree of monopsony power increased in the wake of WTO accession. These diverging dynamics suggest that firms compress real wages to offset loss of market power in the product market due to increased international competition. This gives rise to an increase in the market imperfection gap, which gradually erodes the pro-competitive gains from trade. The paper contributes to the literature by identifying channels through which allocative inefficiencies and misallocation can persist even after trade liberalization.

Suggested Citation

  • Damoah,Kaku Attah, 2019. "Markups, Market Imperfections, and Trade Openness : Evidence from Ghana," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9079, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:9079
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/414481576075847938/pdf/Markups-Market-Imperfections-and-Trade-Openness-Evidence-from-Ghana.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Eric Bartelsman & Sabien Dobbelaere & Alessandro Zona Mattioli, 2024. "Non-Compete Agreements, Tacit Knowledge and Market Imperfections," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 24-055/V, Tinbergen Institute.
    2. Bartelsman, Eric & Dobbelaere, Sabien & Mattioli, Alessandro Zona, 2024. "Non-compete Agreements, Tacit Knowledge and Market Imperfections," IZA Discussion Papers 17260, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    International Trade and Trade Rules; Rural Labor Markets; Labor Markets; Common Carriers Industry; Food&Beverage Industry; Construction Industry; Business Cycles and Stabilization Policies; Plastics&Rubber Industry; Pulp&Paper Industry; Textiles; Apparel&Leather Industry; General Manufacturing; Trade Policy; Trade and Multilateral Issues; Rules of Origin;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F13 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade Policy; International Trade Organizations
    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms
    • O14 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology
    • O24 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Development Planning and Policy - - - Trade Policy; Factor Movement; Foreign Exchange Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:9079. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.