Intra-industrial trade evolution between Brazil and the United States of America from 1997 to 2008

Abstract

By the end of the 1980’s Brazil changed the profile of its commercialrelationships becoming mainly an exporter of manufactured products. The US,being an important trade partner has played a big role on that change, especiallyregarding manufactured products, whose evidence has suggested a growing weight of an intra-industry relationship between the two countries. This paper aims atassessing the intensity of that trade pattern between Brazil and USA from 1990 to2007 through the Grubel - Lloyd index at the level of two and four digits followingthe NCM nomenclature. This analysis has highlighted products with Grubel Lloydindex equal to or higher than 0.7, related to those products whose value comprisesmore than 70% of the total commercial flow between Brazil and USA. Despite thetrade of many items is described by inter-industry relations, most of the valueexchanged between these two countries, throughout the years under scrutiny, isincreasingly defined in terms of intra-industry trade, given the analysis of specificgroups of product.