Standards and political connections: Evidence from Tunisia

In this paper we investigate whether trade liberalization leads to more stringent product standards in a developing country context, uncovering the role that the connected firms’ market share plays in markets dominated by imports. We estimate a two-part model using data over the period from 2002 to 2010 to test whether additional product standards emerge in sectors where politically connected firms have a higher market share. Our main results show that the mechanisms we anticipated are in fact at play in Tunisia. During the implementation period of the EU-Tunisia association agreement, we find that sectors with a higher import share of connected firms – linked to the Ben Ali family – tend to have a higher probability of an increasing number of technical barriers to trade. This result is robust to addressing endogeneity issues and to the introduction of dynamics into the model.