NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES DEMOCRACY AND GLOBALIZATION Barry Eichengreen David Leblang Working Paper 12450 http://www.nber.org/papers/w12450 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 August 2006 The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. ©2006 by Barry Eichengreen and David Leblang. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. Democracy and Globalization Barry Eichengreen and David Leblang NBER Working Paper No. 12450 August 2006 JEL No. F0, F00 ABSTRACT The connections between globalization and democracy are a classic question in international political economy and a topic much debated in foreign policy circles. While the analytical literature is extensive, few previous studies have acknowledged the possibility of bidirectional causality or developed an instrumental variables strategy suitable for addressing it. We do so in this paper and apply our approach to an extensive historical data set. The results suggest the existence of positive relationships running both ways between globalization and democracy, though exceptions obtain at particular times (during the Bretton Woods era) and places (in labor scarce economies). Barry Eichengreen Department of Economics University of California 549 Evans Hall 3880 Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 and NBER
[email protected] David Leblang Department of Political Science University of Colorado Boulder, CO
[email protected] Democracy and Globalization1 Barry Eichengreen and David Leblang July 2006 1. Introduction Democracy and globalization go hand in hand.