Publication: Trade Policies and Sea and Air Freight: The Impact of COVID-19 Lockdowns on Imports and Exports
Loading...
Date
2023-01
ISSN
Published
2023-01
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
This study analyzes how Indonesia’s international trade was affected by its own lockdown policies (domestic) and those of its trading partners (external) in response to COVID-19. The study differentiates between sea freight and air freight, as well as products affected by specific non-tariff measures. Event-study results show that the decline in imports (which were more negatively affected than exports) was mainly attributed to external lockdowns, the impacts of which were more pronounced and persistent for imports entering Indonesia by air (due to restrictions to international travel) and imports subject to port-related non-tariff measures. Domestic lockdowns adversely affected intermediate imports subject to non-tariff measures requiring physical inspection, testing, and approval processes. External lockdowns, which also had a larger impact on exports relative to domestic policies, affected sea and air exports evenly. Demand factors (specifically, workplace closures and stay-at-home orders) in the partner countries were the drivers of the decline in exports. Enhancing trade facilitation to keep goods moving as smoothly as possible, reforming specific non-tariff measures, and improving customs and other procedures would ensure fewer disruptions from shocks in a globally integrated world.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Majune, Socrates; Montfaucon, Angella Faith. 2023. Trade Policies and Sea and Air Freight: The Impact of COVID-19 Lockdowns on Imports and Exports. Policy Research Working Paper; 10271. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/38497 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Geopolitics and the World Trading System(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23)Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05)Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.Publication From Patriarchy to Policy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Legal institutions play an important role in shaping gender equality in economic domains, from inheritance to labor markets. But where do gender equal laws come from? Using cross-country data on social norms and legal equality, this paper investigates the socio-cultural roots of gender inequity in the legal system and its implications for female labor force participation. To identify the impact of social norms, the analysis uses an empirical strategy that exploits pre-modern differences in ancestral patriarchal culture as an instrument for present-day gender norms. The findings show that ancestral patriarchal culture is a strong predictor of contemporary norms, and conservative social norms are associated with more gender inequality in the de jure legal framework, the de facto implementation of laws, and the labor market. The paper presents evidence for a political selection mechanism linking norms to laws: countries with more conservative norms elect political leaders who are more hostile to gender equality, who then pass less progressive legislation. The results highlight the cultural roots and political drivers of legalized gender inequality.Publication Global Socio-economic Resilience to Natural Disasters(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-22)Most disaster risk assessments use damages to physical assets as their central metric, often neglecting distributional impacts and the coping and recovery capacity of affected people. To address this shortcoming, the concepts of well-being losses and socio-economic resilience—the ability to experience asset losses without a decline in well-being—have been proposed. This paper uses microsimulations to produce a global estimate of well-being losses from, and socio-economic resilience to, natural disasters, covering 132 countries. On average, each $1 in disaster-related asset losses results in well-being losses equivalent to a $2 uniform national drop in consumption, with significant variation within and across countries. The poorest income quintile within each country incurs only 9% of national asset losses but accounts for 33% of well-being losses. Compared to high-income countries, low-income countries experience 67% greater well-being losses per dollar of asset losses and require 56% more time to recover. Socio-economic resilience is uncorrelated with exposure or vulnerability to natural hazards. However, a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with a 0.9 percentage point gain in resilience, but this benefit arises indirectly—such as through higher rate of formal employment, better financial inclusion, and broader social protection coverage—rather than from higher income itself. This paper assess ten policy options and finds that socio-economic and financial interventions (such as insurance and social protection) can effectively complement asset-focused measures (e.g., construction standards) and that interventions targeting low-income populations usually have higher returns in terms of avoided well-being losses per dollar invested.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Trade Policy, Green Goods and the Labor Market(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-17)Green goods trade will matter for the transition to a low-carbon global economy as well as for its adaptive capacity to climate events. This study explores green goods trade and related trade policies in the Philippines and its relationship with the labor markets. The paper finds that the country’s green goods trade is limited due to certain costly non-tariff measures affecting energy transition and other types of green goods. Of about 90 measures, five are identified as reform candidates. Reforming these could enhance green goods trade, as there is a positive correlation between imports and exports of green goods. However, increased exports could reduce the number of high-skilled workers, while imports might increase the shares of female workers within industries. Green goods imports also correlate with higher earnings across industries. The study suggests that trade policy reforms may lead to labor shifts, necessitating complementary policies for affected workers when making trade policies more climate-friendly.Publication The Impacts of Lockdown Policies on International Trade in the Philippines(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-01)The Philippines was among the most infected countries in East Asia at the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak. This study analyzes how international trade on various margins was affected by the country’s own lockdown policies and those of trading partners. Using a monthly series of product-by-country data for the period from January 2019 to December 2020 and an event study design, the paper shows that domestic lockdown measures did not affect international trade but external lockdowns affected both ex- ports and imports. The introduction of lockdown measures by trading partners affected imports more than exports, leading to 7 and 56 percent monthly average drops in export and import values, respectively. Restrictions on internal movements and international travel controls in partner countries were responsible for the drop in exports. The slump in imports was because of workplace closure, stay-at-home requirements, restrictions on internal movement, and international travel controls by trading partners of the Philip- pines. Intermediate goods were the key driver of the drop in imports following foreign lockdowns, reflecting supply disruptions in backward global value chain participation. At the same time, exports of intermediate goods were more resilient to the lockdown policies. Finally, both exports and imports were more affected at the extensive margin than the intensive margin, as lockdown measures hindered interactions among people, in turn reducing the potential of businesses to create new relationships and launch new products in foreign markets. Overall, diversified and geographically dispersed suppliers can help countries adjust better to future disruptions.Publication Firms in Global Value Chains during Covid-19(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-07-18)Using detailed monthly firm-level trade data from Indonesia from February 2019 to June 2021, this paper shows that firm-level exports were overall more resilient than imports during Covid-19. Firms that participated in global value chains were more resilient to the Covid-19 shock beyond the immediate short-run compared to firms that did not. However, among global value chain firms, those that faced certain types of non-tariff measures on their import products, notably port of entry restrictions, on average faced larger reductions in export quantities and number of transactions compared to firms that did not face such restrictions, consistent with the evidence of major port congestion during Covid-19. Therefore, although international connectedness could be a source of vulnerability to global shocks in the immediate short run, policies that enable firms to be more globally engaged through global value chains could enhance resilience. Relatedly, tackling measures such as port of entry restrictions can ensure fast and efficient port and customs procedures, especially during periods of high port congestion, as global value chain trade requires goods to cross borders many times.Publication Non-Tariff Measures, Import Competition, and Exports(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10)The empirical evidence on the impact of import competition on economic performance relies mainly on import tariff liberalization as the source of changes to competition. This paper extends this evidence by focusing on non-tariff measures, an increasingly important trade policy tool globally. The analysis examines the competition effect of four specific non-tariff measures on the exporting activity of the universe of Indonesian firms. The focus is on measures that do not clearly address any negative externalities of imports—the supposed objective of non-tariff measures—and hence appear to be protectionist in nature. The results suggest that by restricting import competition, these measures reduce the survival of firms in export markets as well as the intensive and extensive margins of their exports. Non-tariff measures have a more negative effect than import tariffs in most cases and these results are robust to various checks. The analysis provides suggestive evidence that markups are an important channel through which these effects are mediated.Publication Building a Dataset for Non-Tariff Measures and its Usage(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023)As import tariffs have been declining over the past decades, non-tariff measures (NTMs) have become the most frequently used measures in trade policy. The increasing use of NTMs in global trade has highlighted the need for timely, high frequency and accurate data in order to better understand the implications that NTMs have on products, firms and the economy. This manual describes the first high-frequency panel dataset built by the World Bank on the universe of NTMs applied by a country, i.e. Indonesia. The manual includes a comprehensive overview of the purpose, building procedures and usage of the data for Indonesia. The dataset expands on and improves on existing data on Indonesian NTMs collected by other institutions (UNCTAD and ERIA) by covering a broader source base, customizing the data, and by increasing the frequency of updates. By documenting the data collection and transformation process, the manual hopes to facilitate the construction of similar datasets in other countries.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Design Thinking for Social Innovation(2010-07)Designers have traditionally focused on enchancing the look and functionality of products.Publication Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08)The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.Publication Governance Matters VIII : Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996–2008(2009-06-01)This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.Publication Measuring Financial Inclusion : The Global Findex Database(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-04)This paper provides the first analysis of the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) Database, a new set of indicators that measure how adults in 148 economies save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. The data show that 50 percent of adults worldwide have an account at a formal financial institution, though account penetration varies widely across regions, income groups and individual characteristics. In addition, 22 percent of adults report having saved at a formal financial institution in the past 12 months, and 9 percent report having taken out a new loan from a bank, credit union or microfinance institution in the past year. Although half of adults around the world remain unbanked, at least 35 percent of them report barriers to account use that might be addressed by public policy. Among the most commonly reported barriers are high cost, physical distance, and lack of proper documentation, though there are significant differences across regions and individual characteristics.Publication Governance Matters IV : Governance Indicators for 1996-2004(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06)The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.