The (New) Geography of International Trade and Investment: Exploring the extent to which 'distance' matters in the establishment of economic relations

经济学和商业学者普遍认为，北美自由贸易协定和欧盟等区域贸易协定为包括加拿大和英国在内的成员国提供了好处，这些好处可能会受到重新谈判北美自由贸易协定(Caliendo and Parro，2015)和英国退欧(Dingra et al，2018)的威胁。因此，加拿大和英国都寻求使其贸易和投资伙伴多样化，将更遥远的国家包括在内。针对这些关切，我们的知识综合项目将确定距离对各国与更远的伙伴建立强有力的贸易和投资关系的能力的影响。它回应了“技术和数字变革、服务跨境贸易和地理”的主题。它代表着一项国际倡议，致力于综合有关加拿大和英国在全球贸易领导中所扮演角色的知识。这个项目是及时的，因为加拿大和英国的贸易关系对两国和全球市场都具有深刻的社会文化、政治和经济影响。长期以来，经济地理和商业领域的一篇重要文献提供了强有力的证据，证明距离很重要，其中距离不仅包括物理距离，还包括文化和制度距离。例如，有证据表明，当国家拥有共同的边界、共同的语言和共同的体制结构时，双边贸易和投资流动就会更大。这些程式化的事实为贸易和投资协定提供了基本背景，并解释了为什么其中如此多的协定是“地区性的”。与此同时，随着知识的跨境溢出，这些共同点可能会促进和增强贸易和外国直接投资(FDI)的潜在好处。我们将解决的问题是，这些关于距离相关性的程式化事实是否在一个更加全球化的世界中发生了变化，特别是在一个技术可能会使所有形式的距离变得不那么重要的世界。这种可能性的一个具体表现是城市的崛起，以及知识型公司(共同)设在相对较少的几个大而多样化的城市的趋势。因此，我们打算查阅最近关于知识产业(包括服务业)中贸易和投资流动的文献，以研究距离是否重要以及如何重要。我们还将调查城市对这些流动的影响的证据。我们的加拿大-英国合作将1)让国家和地区/城市政府组织，包括与贸易、创新、就业和城市当局有关的部委，寻求促进外国直接投资和技术创新；2)与对国际化和创新的区位战略感兴趣的大公司以及为公司和政府提供这些问题建议的咨询团体接触；3)将我们的主要发现传播给国际商业学者的学术界以及英国和加拿大的智囊团和政策界。

It is a widely held view among economics and business scholars that the regional trade agreements such as NAFTA and EU have provided benefits to member countries, including Canada and the UK, and that these might be threatened by renegotiation of the NAFTA agreement (Caliendo and Parro, 2015), and BREXIT (Dingra et al, 2018). Thus, both Canada and the UK seek to diversity their trade and investment partners to include more distant countries. In response to such concerns, our knowledge synthesis project will identify the impact of distance on the ability of countries to establish strong trade and investment ties with more distant partners. It responds to the theme of "Technological and digital transformations, cross-border trade in services, and geography." It represents an international initiative devoted to synthesizing knowledge about the roles of Canada and the UK in global trade leadership. This project is timely because Canada-UK trade relationships have profound sociocultural, political, and economic implications for both countries and global markets.A significant literature in economic geography and business has long provided strong evidence that'distance' matters, where distance includes not only physical distance, but also cultural and institutional distance. For example, there is evidence that bilateral trade and investment flows are greater when countries share a common border, a common language, and common institutional structures. These stylized facts provide the underlying context for trade and investment agreements and explain why so many of them are 'regional'. At the same time, these commonalities may facilitate and enhance the potential benefits of both trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) as knowledge spills over across borders.The question we will address is whether these stylized facts about the relevance of distance havechanged in a more globalized world, and in particular one where technology may make all forms ofdistance less relevant. A particular manifestation of this possibility is the rise of cities and the tendency for knowledge-based firms to (co) locate in a relatively small number of large and diverse cities. We therefore intend to survey the recent literature on trade and investment flows in knowledge-based industries (which includes services) to examine whether and how distance matters. We will also survey the evidence on the impact of cities on these flows.Our Canada -UK collaboration will 1) make research accessible to national and regional/city governmental organizations, including Ministries concerned with trade, innovation, employment and urban authorities seeking to promote FDI and technological innovation; 2) engage with major companies interested in location strategies for internationalization and innovation as well as consultancy groups advising firms and governments on these matters; 3) disseminate our principal findings to the academic community of international business scholars as well as think-tanks and the policy community in the UK and Canada.