IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/7745.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Does Trade Raise Income? Evidence from the Twentieth Century

Author

Listed:
  • Douglas A. Irwin
  • Marko Tervio

Abstract

Efforts to estimate the effects of international trade on a country's real income have been hampered by the failure to account for the endogeneity of trade. Frankel and Romer recently use a country's geographic attributes - notably its distance from potential trading partners - as an instrument to identify the effects of trade on income in 1985. Using data from the pre- World War I, the interwar, and the post-war periods, this paper finds that the Frankel-Romer result is robust to different time periods, i.e., that instrumenting for trade with geographic characteristics raises the estimated positive effect of trade on income by a substantial margin and, in most of our cases, the precision of those estimates. These results suggest that the downward bias of OLS estimates is systematic and may be due to measurement error, a potential source of which is that trade is an imperfect proxy for a host of economically beneficial interactions between countries. However, the results are not robust to the inclusion of another geographic variable, latitude (distance from the equator).

Suggested Citation

  • Douglas A. Irwin & Marko Tervio, 2000. "Does Trade Raise Income? Evidence from the Twentieth Century," NBER Working Papers 7745, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7745
    Note: DAE ITI
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w7745.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Eichengreen, Barry & Irwin, Douglas A., 1995. "Trade blocs, currency blocs and the reorientation of world trade in the 1930s," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 38(1-2), pages 1-24, February.
    2. Estevadeordal, Antoni, 1997. "Measuring protection in the early twentieth century," European Review of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 1(1), pages 89-125, April.
    3. David H. Romer & Jeffrey A. Frankel, 1999. "Does Trade Cause Growth?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 89(3), pages 379-399, June.
    4. Elhanan Helpman, 1997. "R&D and Productivity: The International Connection," Harvard Institute of Economic Research Working Papers 1798, Harvard - Institute of Economic Research.
    5. Levine, Ross & Renelt, David, 1992. "A Sensitivity Analysis of Cross-Country Growth Regressions," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 82(4), pages 942-963, September.
    6. Prados de la Escosura, Leandro, 2000. "International Comparisons of Real Product, 1820-1990: An Alternative Data Set," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 1-41, January.
    7. Desmond McCarthy & Holger Wolf & Yi Wu, 2000. "The Growth Costs of Malaria," NBER Working Papers 7541, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Robert E. Hall & Charles I. Jones, 1999. "Why do Some Countries Produce So Much More Output Per Worker than Others?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 114(1), pages 83-116.
    9. Sala-i-Martin, Xavier, 1997. "I Just Ran Two Million Regressions," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 87(2), pages 178-183, May.
    10. Jeffrey D. Sachs & Andrew Warner, 1995. "Economic Reform and the Process of Global Integration," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 26(1, 25th A), pages 1-118.
    11. Theil, Henri & Galvez, Janet, 1995. "On Latitude and Affluence: The Equatorial Grand Canyon," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 20(1), pages 163-166.
    12. Francisco Rodríguez & Dani Rodrik, 2001. "Trade Policy and Economic Growth: A Skeptic's Guide to the Cross-National Evidence," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2000, Volume 15, pages 261-338, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. Frankel, Jeffrey & Rose, Andrew, 2000. "An Estimate of the Effect of Currency Unions on Trade and Output," CEPR Discussion Papers 2631, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    14. Jeffrey Frankel & Andrew Rose, 2002. "An Estimate of the Effect of Common Currencies on Trade and Income," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 117(2), pages 437-466.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Herzer, Dierk, 2013. "Cross-Country Heterogeneity and the Trade-Income Relationship," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 194-211.
    2. Niclas Berggren & Henrik Jordahl, 2005. "Does free trade really reduce growth? Further testing using the economic freedom index," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 122(1), pages 99-114, January.
    3. Arjan Lejour & Vladimir Solanic & Paul Tang, 2009. "EU Accession and Income Growth: An Empirical Approach," Transition Studies Review, Springer;Central Eastern European University Network (CEEUN), vol. 16(1), pages 127-144, May.
    4. Badinger, Harald, 2008. "Trade policy and productivity," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 52(5), pages 867-891, July.
    5. Francisco Alcalá & Antonio Ciccone, 2004. "Trade and Productivity," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 119(2), pages 613-646.
    6. Jeffrey A. Frankel & Andrew K. Rose, 2005. "Is Trade Good or Bad for the Environment? Sorting Out the Causality," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 87(1), pages 85-91, February.
    7. Tausch, Arno, 2011. "The ‘four economic freedoms’ and life quality. General tendencies and some hard lessons for EU-27-Europe," MPRA Paper 33225, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Yasir Khan & Attiya Yasmin Javid, 2015. "The Impact of Formal and Informal Institutions on Economic Performance: A Cross-Country Analysis," PIDE-Working Papers 2015:130, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics.
    9. Bretschger, Lucas, 2010. "Taxes, mobile capital, and economic dynamics in a globalizing world," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 32(2), pages 594-605, June.
    10. Noguer, Marta & Siscart, Marc, 2005. "Trade raises income: a precise and robust result," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(2), pages 447-460, March.
    11. Raphael Espinoza, 2012. "Factor Accumulation and the Determinants of TFP in the GCC," OxCarre Working Papers 094, Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, University of Oxford.
    12. Bas Straathof & Gert Jan Linders & Arjan Lejour & Jan Möhlmann, 2008. "The internal market and the Dutch economy: implications for trade and economic growth," CPB Document 168, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    13. Jin, Jang C., 2006. "Can openness be an engine of sustained high growth rates and inflation?: Evidence from Japan and Korea," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 15(2), pages 228-240.
    14. Sadik, Jacques, 2008. "Technology adoption, convergence, and divergence," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 52(2), pages 338-355, February.
    15. Rivera, Sandra A. & Tsigas, Marinos E., 2005. "How does China’s growth affect India? An Economywide Analysis," Conference papers 331359, Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project.
    16. Klaus Wälde & Christina Wood, 2004. "The empirics of trade and growth: where are the policy recommendations?," International Economics and Economic Policy, Springer, vol. 1(2), pages 275-292, January.
    17. James Feyrer, 2019. "Trade and Income—Exploiting Time Series in Geography," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 11(4), pages 1-35, October.
    18. Navaratnam Ravinthirakumaran, 2014. "Applicability of Openness-led Growth Hypothesis in Sri Lanka," South Asia Economic Journal, Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka, vol. 15(2), pages 241-263, September.
    19. Bretschger, Lucas, 2001. "Taking two steps to climb onto the stage: Capital taxes as link between trade and growth," Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Diskussionspapiere 05/2001, University of Greifswald, Faculty of Law and Economics.
    20. Aleksandra Parteka, 2013. "The Role of Trade in Intra-Industry Productivity Growth—the Case of Old and New European Union Countries," Review of Development Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 17(4), pages 712-731, November.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F1 - International Economics - - Trade

    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:nbr:nberwo:7745. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.