Dear Readers,
Welcome to the first issue of The International Trade Journal (ITJ)’s thirty-fifth volume, our annual special issue containing selected papers from the Western Hemispheric Trade Conference. The 24th Annual Conference was sponsored by Texas A&M International University (TAMIU), the A.R. Sanchez, Jr. School of Business, and the Center for the Study of Western Hemispheric Trade, in partnership with the Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas (UAT) Facultad de Comercio, Administración y Ciencias Sociales. The Conference, which was planned for April 15–17th, 2020, was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and on-site activities were canceled. Electronic proceedings, however, were published and the best papers were selected for this special issue of The International Trade Journal. In addition, members of the ITJ’s editorial board selected the paper that won the Best Student Paper Award.
The first article in this special issue is an invited contribution from Fernando Gómez-Zaldívar and Edmundo Molina Pérez. Dr. Molina had kindly agreed to participate in a panel to discuss the economic impact of special economic zones (SEZs). His study looks at the prospects for development poles, a special type of SEZ that the Mexican government has established in the less-developed southern region of Mexico. The article assesses the evolution of the region’s productive capabilities and describes policies that might help the region perform as well as Mexico’s most diversified states.
Doreen Hanke, who was a Ph.D. student at Texas A&M International University at the time of the conference, won the Best Student Paper Award. Her article is the second in this special issue. While earlier work on motivating language has mostly focused on leader-employee communication, this study looks at motivating language used by peers. After proposing and validating a scale for peer motivating language, the article uses data collected using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk tool to look at the relationship between leader motivating language, peer motivating language, and employee outcomes in India and the United States (US). The study finds that peer motivating language is more important than leader motivating language in India, but not the US, and can serve as a substitute for leader motivating language in India.
The third article, by Mohammad Nazrul Islam and Clark M. Wheatley, looks at how firms respond to climate risk. They argue that firms that are exposed to climate risk are more exposed to liquidity shocks and so will favor long-term financing. As a result, these firms will use trade credit less intensively than firms less exposed to climate risk. Their empirical results are consistent with their hypotheses.
The fourth article, by Donald Lien and Erika Zuloaga, looks at how gender-related features of language affect migration patterns. They find that, although several economic and cultural variables are associated with gender migration ratios, gender norms and women’s rights are not consistently correlated with greater relative female migration. In particular, they find a non-linear relationship between the gap between women’s rights in the host and origin countries and female migration and no relationship between gender distinctions in the host country’s language and female migration.
The fifth article, by Rusty V. Karst and Andrew Johnson, studies how academic theories about multinational enterprises and cross-border acquisitions in management, economics, and finance have evolved over time. They argue that as the field has grown and matured, researchers will need to focus more on micro-foundational and contextualized studies that can extend the theoretical underpinnings in these areas.
The sixth article, by Chu V. Nguyen, looks at how lending and deposit rates evolved after the great recession in six countries in Latin America: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Mexico. The study finds different adjustments in the six countries. Most notably, he argues that commercial banks in Colombia and Mexico appear predatory.
The seventh article, by James E. Payne, Mert Topcu, Massomeh Hajille, and Farhang Niroomand, looks at how economic uncertainty affects Americans’ willingness to travel overseas. They use Toda-Yamamoto long-run causality tests and generalized impulse response analysis to explore the relationship between U.S. business cycles, movements in the exchange rate, global and US policy uncertainty, and overseas travel from the US.
The final article, which was submitted as a note by Bashar Malkawi, describes how the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) treat trade in digital goods. The article argues that the USMCA, which explicitly includes provisions related to trade in digital goods, was seen as a breakthrough in this area. The author notes that the USMCA is likely to become a model for future agreements on digital trade that involve the United States.
As usual, we would like to acknowledge the people who ensure the ITJ’s success. We would like to thank the authors for their contributions, the anonymous referees for the detailed and timely comments they provide, the team at the International Trade Institute at Texas A&M International University for processing submissions quickly and efficiently, our Editorial Board for their expert guidance, and our publisher, Taylor and Francis, for ensuring the high quality of the ITJ.
This special issue would not be possible without the hard work of everyone who contributed to the organization of the Conference or its online delivery. We would particularly like to thank Dr. Stephen J. Meardon, the outgoing director of the Center for the Study of Western Hemispheric Trade, who provided intellectual leadership in the initial planning of the Conference. As with any conference, the Western Hemispheric Trade Conference only succeeds when people participate in it. We would, therefore, like to thank the people who submitted their work. We would also like to thank the program committee and chairs who read and assessed the submissions to the Conference. The program committee members from TAMIU were Steve Sears, Christopher Boudreaux, Jorge Brusa, Ken Hung, Balaji Janamanchi, Ned Kock, Amy Palacios, Antonio Rodriguez, and Constant Yayi. The members from UAT were Adán López Mendoza and René Adrián Salinas Salinas.
Many other people contributed to the Conference planning and production of the online materials. Pedro Gallegos, Jr., Jessica M. Cavazos, and Heleodoro Lozano served as program coordinators with support from Marian Gonzalez and Eduardo Moreno. We would also like to especially thank Amy Palacios, the associate director of the Center for the Study of Western Hemispheric Trade. In addition to serving as a member of the program committee, Ms. Palacios organized sessions, arranged keynote speeches, and handled the last-minute shift to an online format.
We would like to invite all ITJ readers to attend next year’s Conference on April 14th to 16th, 2021, either in-person in Laredo, Texas or virtually. Because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Conference will have two tracks: one for online participants and one for people able to attend in person. If the in-person event proceeds as currently planned, in-person participants will have to comply with COVID-19 precautions. As we did this year, we will invite the authors of the best papers to submit them to a special issue of The International Trade Journal. Participants in both tracks – online and in-person – will be eligible to have their work included in the special issue. Additional participants will be invited to submit short summary notes of their work. We look forward to seeing you either in-person or online in April 2021!