From the Editor

I.

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the first issue of The International Trade Journal (ITJ)’s thirty-eighth volume, our annual special issue containing selected papers from the Western Hemispheric Trade Conference. The 27^th 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 was held between April 12^th and April 14^th, 2023. Participants presented 75 papers in 20 in-person and online sessions. Electronic proceedings were also published, and the best papers were selected for this special issue of The International Trade Journal.¹

The 27^th Annual Conference kicked off on Wednesday, April 12^th, with a presentation by the IBC and Commerce Bank Keynote Speaker, Neil Irwin, the Chief Economic Correspondent for Axios. Mr. Irwin’s presentation, “Our New Economic Era,” discussed recent economic events that have affected the United States. He asserted that the next decade’s economic environment will be sharply different from the environment that preceded it. He argued that labor will become more scarce and capital more expensive as the population ages. This will make it more difficult for the government to borrow money and will make both investment and hiring more costly for firms. The special issue includes a review of Irwin’s recent book, How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World: The Definitive Guide to Adapting and Succeeding in High-Performance Careers (Irwin 2019).

Thursday’s keynote presentation, “Cryptocurrencies and U.S. Communities of Color,” was given by Tonatzin Carmona, a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at Brookings Metro.² Ms. Carmona’s presentation focused on the opportunities and risks associated with investing in and using cryptocurrencies, particularly for Black and Hispanic Americans. She noted that Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to invest in cryptocurrencies than white Americans, possibly because they do not trust formal financial sector institutions or because they lack access to them. She noted, however, that successfully investing in cryptocurrencies can be difficult. The problems include excessive transaction fees, high operational risks, and extremely volatile returns. To better protect investors, she suggested the government should improve financial education, strengthen regulation, and make fees more transparent.

Friday’s keynote presentation, “The World Development Report 2022: Finance for an Equitable Recovery,” was given by Leora Klapper, a Lead Economist at the World Bank and the Director of the 2022 World Development Report (WDR).³ The 2022 WDR examines the role that finance can play as countries recover from the global health crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The WDR argues the increased private and public sector indebtedness that resulted from the pandemic will mean emerging markets will face serious financial risks in the coming years. To overcome these risks, emerging market governments will need to help their banks handle non-performing loans, improve the legal framework associated with bankruptcy, ensure continued access to finance, and manage their own higher debt. The WDR proposes new, and sometimes novel, policies and programs that governments can adopt to help them do this. The special issue includes a review of the 2022 WDR by Nana T. Owusu-Peprah.

Members of the ITJ’s editorial board and the Conference Committee selected papers for the annual Best Student Paper Awards. The award for the Best Student Paper was given to Xinhui Huang, a Ph.D. student in International Business from TAMIU, for his paper “Opportunity or Challenge? Impact of Product Market Threats on a Firm’s Bankruptcy Risk.” Sean Byrne received an honorable mention for his paper “The Debt Ceiling Crisis, Political Uncertainty, and Interest Group Competition.” In addition, Karyme Castillo Castro received an honorable mention for the Best Paper by an Undergraduate Student for her paper “Dove’s Marketing Strategy: How to Successfully Challenge Beauty Standards and the Perception of the Ideal Self.”

Members of the ITJ’s editorial board and the Conference Committee also selected the papers that were considered for publication in this special issue. The first article, by Xiaochuan Song and Marilyn Whitman, looks at the relationship between abusive supervisors, emotional exhaustion, impostorism, and workplace behavior. They confirm that employees with abusive supervisors report greater emotional exhaustion than other employees and show that workers with high levels of emotional exhaustion are less likely to engage in positive organizational citizenship and more likely to engage in negative work behavior. Finally, they find that the relationship between emotional exhaustion and workplace behavior is moderated for individuals with high feelings of impostorism.

The second article, by Rusty V. Karst, Nolan Gaffney, and Andrew Johnson, introduces a conceptual model of how multinational enterprises (MNEs) seek to align their human resource management systems and practices across countries. They argue that the MNE’s systems and practices will drive its global strategy as it tries to align its strategies and practices across countries. They note that institutional differences between home and host countries will affect how easy it is for MNEs to do this. MNEs from emerging markets face particular challenges in this respect and, therefore, might choose to only align their strategies and practices when entering other emerging markets. In contrast, they will generally conform to the host country’s practices and strategies when the host country is a developed economy.

The third article, by Juan Agustin Tapia Alba and Cesaire Chiatchoua, examines the Mexican government’s trade policy during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the pandemic meant trade fell in 2020, it quickly recovered in 2021 and 2022. During this time, the government took steps to reduce smuggling, drug trafficking, and tax evasion. It did this by implementing institutional and regulatory changes that gave the military greater influence over customs and trade administration. The authors note that these changes coincided with increased exports and higher revenues from taxes on foreign trade.⁴

The fourth article, written by Sean K. Byrne, studies how policy uncertainty during debt ceiling crises affected the three-month U.S. Treasury bill yield spread in 2011, 2013, and 2015. The author finds that policy uncertainty, which he measures using Google Trends, negatively affected the yield spread. He also finds that support and opposition from interest groups concerned about the debt ceiling also affected the yield spread.

In addition to the full-length papers, several additional papers have been accepted as notes. The first note, by Karyme Castillo Castro, looks at Dove’s marketing strategy and its relationship to beauty standards. This paper won an honorable mention for the Best Paper by an Undergraduate Student in the conference’s Best Student Paper competition. Castro discusses the development of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty and how it differed from standard advertising campaigns that featured highly edited pictures of professional models. Castro argues that the campaign was successful from both a commercial viewpoint and as an example of integrated social marketing.

The second note, by Aketi Gayatri Jahnavi and M.B. Dastagiri, looks at farmer suicides in India. The authors argue that the globalization of the food grain industry and privatization of India’s seed producers led to farmers taking on increased debt, an important cause of farmer suicides. They also estimate a fixed-effect panel model. The model suggests that irrigation and fertilizer use are negatively associated with farmer suicides, while imports and exports of agricultural goods are positively associated with deaths.

The final note, by Tochukwu J. Emegwa, Leonel Prieto, and Pash Gopal, examines the complex relationship between democracy, trade openness, and international peace.⁵ The authors find that democracy is associated with trade openness, but they also find that culture, as measured by uncertainty avoidance, moderates this relationship. In addition, they find culture, as measured by power-distance, moderates the relationship between trade openness and international peace.

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. As with any conference, the Western Hemispheric Trade Conference only succeeds when people participate in it. We would, therefore, like to thank the researchers who submitted their work.

We would also like to thank the program committee and members of the editorial board who read and assessed the submissions to the conference. These include Steve Sears, Christopher Boudreaux, Jorge Brusa, Zachary Cohle, Balaji Janamanchi, Ned Kock, Amy Palacios, James Payne, Leonel Prieto, Antonio Rodriguez, Haibo Wang, Shiyu Yang, Constant Yayi, and Rafael Zago. The members from UAT were Adan Lopez Mendoza and Rene Adrian Salinas Salinas.

Many other people contributed to the conference planning and production of the online materials. Jessica Cavazos and Jasmine Speer served as program coordinators with support from Karla Vasquez, Heleodoro Lozano, Lissette Hernandez, and Nadya Larumbe. 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 complicated logistics of our hybrid online and in-person conference.

We would like to invite all ITJ readers to attend next year’s conference on April 10^th to 12^th, 2024, either in-person in Laredo, Texas, or virtually online. As with last year’s conference, the conference will have two tracks: one for online participants and one for in-person attendees. 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 2024!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The proceedings are available at the following link: freetrade.tamiu.edu/pdf/conf/27ConfProceedings.pdf.

² This presentation is available at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr4OM9SLluA&t=1153s.

³ Word Bank (2022) is available at the following link: https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2022.

⁴ Several recent articles in the ITJ looked at trade and trade policy in Mexico before the pandemic (Hernandez-Trillo 2018; Nguyen 2016; Ramírez Sánchez, Calderon, and Sánchez León 2018).

⁵ Another recent article in the ITJ has looked at the relationship between peace and trade (Hanedar 2016). Boudreaux (2015) and Parakh and Aditya (2023) study the relationship between democracy and trade openness.