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Hiau Looi Kee

Lead Economist, Development Economics

Hiau Looi Kee is a Lead Economist with the Trade Team of the World Bank Research Department. Currently, she also serves as an Associate Editor of the Review of International Economics and the Editor of the Policy Research Working Paper Series of the World Bank in Trade.  Her research focuses on trade, trade policies, and global value chains at the firm and aggregate levels. Her current projects consist of studying domestic value added in exports for a wide range of countries, large-scale estimations of trade policy measurements in terms of import demand elasticities, ad valorem equivalent of non-tariff measures, and trade restrictiveness indexes. Her most recent works include deriving a new methodology to estimate the domestic value added ratio in exports, to study the impacts of high-speed railways of China through firm linkages, the impact of export ban of nickel in Indonesia in the downstream industries, as well as the mixing and matching of tariffs and non-tariff measures for countries to address domestic and global causes, to explain the Sino-EU trade disputes on battery electric vehicles and the meteoric rise of green product exports of China. Her works have been published in top general interests and field journals, including the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of International Economics. She has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Davis. 


FEATURED RESEARCH
  • Trade Fraud and Non-Tariff Measures

    Journal of International Economics, September 2022
    Similar to tariffs, non-tariff measures (NTMs) may induce trade fraud when they are restrictive. This paper examines whether discrepancies observed in the official trade statistics of importing and exporting countries are partly due to trade fraud from evading border NTMs. To capture the restrictiveness of NTMs, this paper estimates the ad valorem equivalent (AVE) with importer-exporter-product variations. This paper presents a theoretical model and empirical evidence showing that discrepancies increase with AVEs, consistent with the trade fraud due to traders intentionally misdeclaring countries of origin or misclassify products in order to evade border NTMs. The results are driven by homogeneous products and the trade between developed and developing countries.
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Contact
Tel : +1 202 473 4155
hlkee@worldbank.org


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