Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 3.1
Index of world manufactures trade to world manufacturing production (1950
ΒΌ
1).
Source
: Data from United Nations 1962 and World Trade Organization 2013
Table 3.1
Domestic
shipments by transport
mode, 2011
Truck
10,225,111.30
Rail
373,930.16
Water
158,396.12
Air
150,535.50
Other and unknown
2,549,256.90
Source
: Federal Highway Administration
The important point I want to make for this paper is that these forces were more
or less irrelevant to interregional trade. Changes in trade policy obviously weren't
an issue, because interstate trade is constitutionally free from barriers. Progress in
transportation technology was arguably far less important too. Table
3.1
shows the
2011 breakdown of U.S. interstate shipments of goods by transport mode (
Federal
Highway Administration
); by value, shipments overwhelmingly move by truck.
(Many ton-miles move by train, but that's largely low-value products, especially
coal.) And given the absence of large wage differentials within the United States,
the ability to slice up the value chain and outsource labor-intensive segments wasn't
going to lead to a significant rise in interregional trade.
Thus one might suspect that the explosion of international trade was not matched
by comparable growth in interregional trade. Is this suspicion true?
We can do a quick and dirty test by looking at data from the Freight Analysis
Framework, which tracks shipments of goods between U.S. states as well as state
exports to and imports from abroad. Specifically, we can look at the inflation-
adjusted changes in domestic shipments, exports, and imports from 1997 to 2011;
this doesn't cover the whole period of hyperglobalization, but is nonetheless
illuminating. Table
3.2
shows what happened. Imports grew much faster than
