Trade liberalization, prices and markups on Brazilian steel industry
trade liberalization, productionfunctionestimation, markups, Braziliansteelindustry.
The benefits of trade liberalization have been shown in economic literature for decades. Nonetheless, there is a substantial lack of data, especially on a firm level, to support a deeper analysis on the impacts of these trade policies, but the development of production function methods that rely on fewer data have made this analysis possible. Therefore, studies have show up some unexpected results of trade liberalization processes on firms. This study replicates the methodology used to analyze indian trade liberalization, making use of the estimation of production functions to estimate the behavior of markups on Brazilian steel industries during the trade liberalization that happened over the 90s. The Brazilian steel industry undergone an aggressive trade reform and privatization, and yet no changes on relative prices can be seen. Also, some report on the period have show a rise on profits and the privatization data show that the sector suffered a concentration, caused by the privatization process where some companies bought many different industries. The production function and markups for the sector were estimated for the years between 1990 and 1998. Despite the alert point mentioned, the estimated markup have been show to decrease on the period, indicating that the trade reform had results as expected from the economic literature.