12.06.2024 New Publication: "The scale efficiency of US bilateral exports and the COVID-19 pandemic"

A new chapter for "Reference Module in Social Sciences" published by Elsevier on "The scale efficiency of US bilateral exports and the COVID-19 pandemic". 

This chapter is available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-44-313776-1.00264-6

Abstract
In the second quarter of 2020, the United States faced an economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, which reduced the country's production capacity and volume of bilateral exports. Due to the expected adverse impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on bilateral exports, we aim to assess the impact of the pandemic on the scale efficiency of US bilateral exports. We first identified the determinants of bilateral exports from the United States to its ten major trading partners using a generalized gravity model and the Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood (PPML) method during 2010:Q1-2023:Q4. After identifying these determinants, we employed them as input vectors to calculate the scale efficiency changes of bilateral exports using the Malmquist index. The results obtained from this study indicate that bilateral exports have been positively impacted by the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States and its trading partners, regional trade agreements, and common border. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on exports was negative and statistically significant. More importantly, the pandemic reduced the scale efficiency of US bilateral exports in the second, third, and fourth quarters of 2020, when the government imposed strict controls to manage it.