Long-term Specialization and Trade Flow Patterns of Heavy Industrial and Light Industrial Goods: A Comparative Analysis of Anglophone and Nordic countries

Recent studies focusing on the analysis of emissions embodied in trade have shown that high-income countries are increasingly becoming net importers of emissions. This is commonly explained by the economies’ changing trade specialization in heavy and light industrial goods. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate and compare the trade specialization patterns of twelve Anglophone and Nordic countries between 1962 and 2016 by using two trade specialization indicators: the normalized trade balance and the revealed symmetric comparative advantage (RSCA) index. The results do not support the claim that the Anglophone or Nordic countries have increasingly specialized in the export of light industrial or the import of heavy industrial goods. Instead, it has rather been found that natural resources, such as wood or basic metals, have been very trade-determinant factors throughout the entire period. Overall, the results suggest that other reasons than a changing trade structure must be responsible for the increasing emissions embodied in imports