Trade Openness and Growth: Pursuing Empirical Glasnost

Andreas Billmeier () and Tommaso Nannicini ()

No 07/156, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: Studies of the impact of trade openness on growth are based either on cross-country analysis-which lacks transparency-or case studies-which lack statistical rigor. We apply transparent econometric methods drawn from the treatment evaluation literature to make the comparison between treated (i.e., open) and control (i.e., closed) countries explicit while remaining within a unified statistical framework. First, matching estimators highlight the rather far-fetched country comparisons underlying common cross-country results. When appropriately restricting the sample, we confirm a positive and significant effect of openness on growth. Second, we apply synthetic control methods-which account for endogeneity due to unobservable heterogeneity-to countries that liberalized their trade regime and we show that trade liberalization has often had a positive effect on growth.

Keywords: Working Paper; Trade policy; International trade; Economic growth; Economic models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-int
Date: 2007-07-13
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2007/wp07156.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Trade Openness and Growth: Pursuing Empirical Glasnost (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:07/156

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund
Address: International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().