IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/imf/imfwpa/2017-231.html

Trade and Income in the Long Run: Are There Really Gains, and Are They Widely Shared?

Author

Listed:
  • Mr. Diego A. Cerdeiro
  • Andras Komaromi

Abstract

In the cross section of countries, there is a strong positive correlation between trade and income, and a negative relationship between trade and inequality. Does this reflect a causal relationship? We adopt the Frankel and Romer (1999) identification strategy, and exploit countries' exogenous geographic characteristics to estimate the causal effect of trade on income and inequality. Our cross-country estimates for trade's impact on real income are consistently positive and significant over time. At the same time, we do not find any statistical evidence that more trade increases aggregate measures of income inequality. Heeding previous concerns in the literature (e.g. Rodriguez and Rodrik, 2001; Rodrik, Subramanian and Trebbi, 2004), we carefully analyze the validity of our geography-based instrument, and confirm that the IV estimates for the impact of trade are not driven by other direct or indirect effects of geography through non-trade channels.

Suggested Citation

  • Mr. Diego A. Cerdeiro & Andras Komaromi, 2017. "Trade and Income in the Long Run: Are There Really Gains, and Are They Widely Shared?," IMF Working Papers 2017/231, International Monetary Fund.
    • Handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2017/231
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=45341
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Valerie Cerra, 2022. "A Framework For Inclusive And Sustainable Growth In Asia And The Pacific," Asia-Pacific Sustainable Development Journal, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), vol. 29(1), pages 17-41, May.
    2. Ms. Kimberly Beaton & Ms. Valerie Cerra & Metodij Hadzi-Vaskov, 2021. "Trade, Jobs, and Inequality," IMF Working Papers 2021/178, International Monetary Fund.
    3. Hisham Mohamed Hassan & Sonal Devesh & Omer Ali Ibrahim, 2022. "The Importance of Trade Openness and Inflation for Attracting Foreign Direct Investment in GCC Countries," International Journal of Economics & Business Administration (IJEBA), International Journal of Economics & Business Administration (IJEBA), vol. 0(4), pages 17-40.
    4. Shuguang Liu & Xiaowen Tang & Yubin Zhao, 2024. "Global Value Chain Participation, Employment Structure, and Urban–Rural Income Gap in the Context of Sustainable Development," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 16(5), pages 1-19, February.
    5. Syed H. Shah & Muhammad A. Kamal & Da L. Yu, 2022. "Did China‐Pakistan free trade agreement promote trade and development in Pakistan?," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 27(3), pages 3459-3474, July.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2017/231. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Akshay Modi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imfffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.