Facts and figures on intermediated trade

Over the past several years, trade economists have begun exploring the role that intermediaries play in facilitating trade. Papers by James E. Rauch and Joel Watson (2004), DimitraPetropoulou (2007) and Pol Antras and Arnaud Costinot (2009) model intermediaries as agents that facilitate matching between sellers/exporters and foreign buyers. These papers examine how improved intermediation (matching) technologies affect trade volumes and the gains from trade. Bernardo S. Blum, Sebastian Claro and Ignatius Horstmann (2009) embed a reduced-form matching model, inspired by Robert Townsend (1983),
into a heterogeneous firm, trade model and examine how changes in the trading environment affect trade costs, export/import volumes and the extentof trade flowing through trade intermediaries. A key modeling challenge for this literature is how to structure matching and intermediation technologies in trading environments. Blum, Claro and Horstmann (2009) provide certain
facts for Chile-Colombia trade and use these facts to structure trading technologies. In this paper we provide a broader set of facts on trade
intermediaries, using new datasets for Chile and for Chile-Argentina trade.1
We think that these facts will prove particularly useful for future modeling of trade intermediaries.