Visto che mi parli del discorso di un madrelingua tedesco, posso ipotizzare una traduzione errata di un termine che può avere questo significato, anche considerando il contesto della frase.

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Is the Internet above the Law of Gravity?

"One of the clearest and most robust findings in economics is that international trade is subjected to gravity."

See Pg 3
The literature on empirically identifying the trade cost behind gravity issmall.1Rauch (1996, 1999) estimates the gravity effect for homogeneous anddifferentiated products separately, in an attempt to link gravity to searchcosts, and find that indeed search costs account for part of it.
1See Harrigan (2001) for a survey.2

[...] Transportation costs and search costs are two of the most commonlyasserted reasons for distance to matter in gravity models.

[..] Therefore, our result thatdistance still matters for free digital goods suggests that there are likely otherreasons for gravity also matter.

[..] The usual reasons given for gravity suggest that distanceshould not matter; however, we include it to see if the usual reasons arecomplete explanations for gravity

[...] Table 3 show parameter estimates of equation 1 for the sample of allwebsite categories. In the first and second columns the number of internetusers in the country is used as a proxy for the number of websites in thecountry. As expected this variable is positive and significant capturing the“mass” effect of gravity.
Does the internet defy the law of gravity?


Abstract
We show that gravity holds in the case of digital goods consumed over the Internet that have no trading costs. Therefore trade costs cannot fully account for the effects of distance on trade. In particular, we show that Americans are more likely to visit websites from nearby countries, even controlling for language, income, immigrant stock, etc. Furthermore, we show that this effect only holds for taste-dependent digital products, such as music, games, and pornography. For these, a 1% increase in physical distance reduces website visits by 3.25%. For non-taste-dependent products, such as software, distance has no statistical effect.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022199606...

6 Conclusions

We have shown that the gravity model holds, even in an environment wheretransportation costs should be zero and trust barriers should not matter.This result is robust to many different specifications. The Internet does notappear to have brought about the death of distance, even for free digitalgoods on the web.11



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Note added at 1 hr (2017-04-19 10:54:53 GMT)
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link di riferimento primo testo

http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~horstman/blum.pdf