A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Yu, Miaojie Working Paper Trade globalization and political liberalization: A gravity approach TIGER Working Paper Series, No. 104 Provided in Cooperation with: TIGER - Transformation, Integration and Globalization Economic Research, Warsaw Suggested Citation: Yu, Miaojie (2007) : Trade globalization and political liberalization: A gravity approach, TIGER Working Paper Series, No. 104, Transformation, Integration and Globalization Economic Research (TIGER), Warsaw This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/140756 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu No. 104 Trade Globalization and Political Liberalization: A Gravity Approach Miaojie Yu Warsaw, July 2007 Trade Globalization and Political Liberalization: A Gravity Approach Miaojie Yuy China Center for Economic Research (CCER) Peking University, China July 2007 Abstract The literature has paid very little attention to a potential positive endogenous nexus between trade globalization and political liberalization. In this paper, I apply a structural approach to investigate two-way causality between the two based on the gravity trade theory, using data from a sample of 134 IMF countries over the pe- riod 1974-1998. An extensive search shows that trade globalization dampens political liberalization, though political liberalization fosters trade globalization. The paper also presents ample evidence of simultaneous bias when such bidirectional causality is ignored. Finally, it contains a thorough exploration of parameter heterogeneity by income and by region. JEL: F13, P16 Keywords: Trade, Democracy, Gravity Equation I would like to thank Robert Feenstra, Joaquim Silvestre, Peter Lindert, Deborah Swenson, Justin Yifu Lin, Bruce Blonigen and conference participants in the 6th Annual Asian Paci…c Rim University Conference at Eugene, Oregon, for their very helpful comments. All errors are mine. yChina Center for Economic Research, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China. Phone: +86-10-6275- 3109, Fax: +86-10-6275-1474, Email: [email protected]. "It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity." — –Ko… Annan 1 Introduction One of the important components of globalization is the growing trade ‡ow. Since the 1960s, trade globalization has advanced tremendously. In 2005, the world trade in goods and services reached $10.51 trillion, accounting for more than a quarter of the global produced goods and services.1 For many industrialized countries, the share of merchandise trade relative to GDP remained stable during the last few decades. Since the service sector has grown faster(Rodrik, 1996), the world is much more integrated today than at any time before when we measure merchandise trade relative to merchandise value-added instead (Feenstra, 1998). For example, the average bilateral trade volume grew twice as fast as country GDP for OECD countries from 1958 to 1988 (Baier and Bergstrand, 2001). On the other hand, the level of merchandise trade relative to GDP for developing countries increased from around 50% in the early 1960s to 75% in the late 1990s (Rudra, 2005). Simultaneously, the world has made signi…cant progress toward democracy over these decades. Stimulated by the …rst wave of democratization in the early 19th century, political liberalization experienced a second wave that started at the end of World War II, and a the third wave that pattered by the early 1960s (Huntington, 1993). In particular, there were about 36 countries that had democratic regimes in that era (Papaioannou and Siourounis, 1 Data source: WTO, International Trade Statistics (Geneva, 2006), Table II.2. 1 2005), and this number has increased dramatically. Since the late 1980s, 70% of developing countries made substantial improvements in political liberalization (Rudra, 2005). This paper tries to make progress towards understanding the endogenous nexus be- tween trade globalization and political liberalization. A country’s political liberalization has a signi…cant e¤ect on globalization. The democratization of a nation, which is a stan- dard index of political liberalization 2, essentially implies that political power is transferred from non-elected elites to a wider population group, which in turn pushes their govern- ment to choose a trade policy favorable to them. Accordingly, trade volume is changed due to a change in trade policy (Milner and Kubota, 2005). Without a doubt, the e¤ects of democratization on trade are di¤erent between developed and developing countries (O’ Rourke and Taylor, 2006, Yu, 2006). On the other hand, there is a reverse causality of trade globalization on political liberalization. Trade does not only change the consumption possibility set for trading partners but also creates a channel for people to communicate ideas, which would be a spillover from a country to its trading partner (Lipset, 1960). Previous studies have paid very little attention to the two-way causality relationship. Most only mention one of the two causal connections. Some researchers emphasize the e¤ects of democratization on trade. They include, among others, Grofman and Gray (2000), Fidrumc (2001), Quinn (2001), Milner and Kubota (2005), Giavazzi and Tabellini (2005), O’Rourke and Taylor (2006), and Yu (2006). These studies vary in theoretical setups, operation channels, empirical methodology, democracy measurement, countries 2 According to Giavazzi and Tabellini (2005): "By political liberalization, we mean the event of becoming a democracy, as conventionally de…ned by political scientists." 2 coverage, and time span, yet they all reach a similar result: democracy fosters trade. On the other hand, some other studies such as Bussmann (2002), Li and Reuveny (2003), Lopez-Cordova and Meissner (2005), Papaioannou and Siourounis (2005), Roberto and Rodrik (2004), and Rudra (2005), focus on the e¤ect of trade on democracy. The …ndings from such studies diverge. For example, Lopez-Cordova and Meissner (2005) and Rudra (2005) …nd a positive e¤ect of trade on democracy; conversely, Li and Reuveny (2003) and Rigobon and Rodrik (2004) argue that the impact is negative. Last but not least, Bussmann (2002) …nds no impact of trade globalization on democracy at all. The studies that concentrate on a one-way e¤ect could su¤er from an estimation bias since globalization and democratization are mutually a¤ected. Democracy is an impor- tant index of institutional quality, which is clearly endogenous (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, 2001). Democratization a¤ects globalization, which in turn a¤ects the next stage of democratization. Few studies treat them as jointly evolving phenomena. Recent studies such as Giavazzi and Tabellini (2005) and Eichengreen and Leblang (2006) take an important step forward. Particularly, Giavazzi and Tabellini (2005) use the di¤erence- in-di¤erence empirical methodology to argue that countries that liberalize the economy followed by democratization perform much better than those countries that reverse the sequence. Eichengreen and Leblang (2006) provide a variety of estimations to argue the existence of a bidirectional positive causality between trade openness and democracy, using long historical data from years 1870-2000. To completely investigate the mutual e¤ects of trade and democracy, this paper consid- ers their bidirectional causality in line with the works of Giavazzi and Tabellini (2005) and 3 Eichengreen and Leblang (2005). However, in contrast to previous studies, the estimations in this paper have a theoretical basis. Particularly, a gravity model is used to underpin the e¤ects of democracy on trade. In its simplest form, the gravity model assumes that trade globalization is positively proportional to trading countries’GDP but is negatively related to their transportation costs. The importer’sdemocratization could a¤ect arti…cial trans- port costs (e.g., tari¤s) and then change bilateral trade volume (O’Rourke and Taylor, 2006). Also, empirical evidence shows that a democratic regime could become a favorable exporter in international trade. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that products produced in highly democratic countries have a relatively high quality due to their intrinsic institutional stability and relatively strict quality regulation, ceteris paribus (Yu, 2006). Given this theoretical background, I therefore choose import volume as