Analyzing Argentinaâ€™s Trade Essay.

Describe the evolution of the volume of exports and imports. For this task you will need data aggregated over all products and all partners for the whole period available.

Generate a table with the time series of the country’s total exports and imports including the annual percentage change and the trade balance for every year.
Add to the table the aggregate world exports for each year, as well as the annual percentage change.

Compute and include in the table your country’s export share in world exports for each year, as well as the annual percentage change in the share.

Generate a line diagram for your country’s exports share over time. Briefly discuss your findings.

Task 2. Analyse the degree of integration of your country to the world economy. In this point, in addition to the data downloaded in Task 1 you will need to download GDP at current US$.

Generate a table and a line diagram where you show the evolution of your country’s openness to trade for the whole period of available data. Also include in your table the annual change over time. Trade openness is computed using the following formula:

Briefly discuss your findings. Make sure that your analysis includes references to specific political or economic events that may relate to the evolution of the openness to trade in your country. Support your analysis by research on relevant literature when appropriate.

Task 3. Analyse the pattern of exports specialisation. For this task you will need to download your country’s exports data disaggregated by industries (SITC 3-digit level). Download the data for the earliest year available, one year around the middle of your time series (possibly end of the 1980’s or beginning of the 1990’s), and for the most recent year in your dataset (if you find some missing observations that is ok, as long as there is enough data to conduct the analysis just work with what you have).

In your Excel spread sheet(s) calculate the index of Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) for the manufacturingindustries at the SITC 3-digit level using the relevant data. Please keep RCA values to 3 decimal places. Note that the data downloaded may include manufacturing and non-manufacturing industries. The manufacturing industries are those with coding between 5 and 8. The RCA of an industry of country in year is given by:

where _!"# is the export value of industry of country at year . The denominator incorporates aggregated world values (all countries).

Generate 3 tables where you list the top 10 industries by comparative advantage in each of the selected years (one table per year). Each table should include the rank, industry ID, industry name and the corresponding RCA.

Note: The index represents the share of a particular industry in the total exports of a country, relative to the share of that industry in world trade. A country is said to have a revealed comparative advantage in an industry when the corresponding index is greater than 1 ( > 1).

Briefly discuss your findings analysing the patterns and trends of comparative advantage. What do you think are the sources of the revealed comparative advantage and its change over time (in case a change is observed)? Your discussion should be supported not only by the data analysis but also by research on relevant literature and the theories studied in the subject.

Task 4. Analyse the geographical pattern of trade. For this task you will need to download trade data by trade partner.

Using aggregate exports by trade partner identify and report the top ten export destinations (by export value) of your chosen country. Generate a table where you include the top ten partners in each of the years selected in Task 3. Discuss your findings. Your discussion should be supported not only by the data analysis but also by research on relevant literature and the theories studied in the subject.