The Impact of Immigrant Business Ownership on International Trade

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• 研討會日期 : 2017-04-25
• 時間 : 14:30
• 主講人 : Professor Loretta Fung
• 主持人 : Professor Tzu-Ting Yang
• 地點 : Conference Room B110
• 演講者簡介 : Professor Fung received her Ph.D. from University of California, Davis in 2002. She is currently an Associate Professor at National Tsing Hua University. Her research interests include micro responses to exchange rate movements, international trade and investment, productivity analysis, and economic development.
• 演講摘要 : The impact of immigrants on international trade has been an important research question for policy and academic communities. It is particularly important for Canada as it is a small open economy with a relatively large immigrant population. This paper empirically investigates the effect of immigrant business ownership on international trade in Canada using a newly developed firm-level database with detailed business ownership and trade information. The new data allow us to better distinguish between the effect of immigrants on lowering information cost and on product demand, and to assess the impact on both extensive and intensive margins of international trade. The results show that the effect of immigrant business ownership on trade is significant and positive on both the extensive and intensive margins. On average, ceteris paribus, in the manufacturing sector, compared to Canadian-owned enterprises, immigrant-owned enterprises have higher probability of importing (by 6.6 percentage points) from and exporting (by 2.1 percentage points) to the immigrant owners’ regions of origin. Also, conditional on being importers (exporters), immigrant-owned firms have stronger trade connections with their regions of origin than their Canadian-owned counterparts since they significantly trade more products and larger real values. The impact of immigrant business ownership is even larger in the wholesale trade sector, which highlight the role of immigrants as trade intermediaries. Among immigrant-owned firms, the owners admitted through the business, the skilled labour, or the provincial nominee categories, or the owners who had more education upon arrival are likely to have greater impacts on international trade.