 Buying National: Democracy, Public Procurement, and International TradeDaniel Yuichi Kono and Stephanie J. Rickard International Interactions, 2014, vol. 40, issue 5, 657-682 Abstract: Many studies show that democracy promotes freer trade. However, because they typically focus on “at-the-border” barriers such as tariffs, we know little about democracy’s effects on “behind-the-border” barriers such as discrimination in government procurement. We address this question by asking how democracy affects governments’ incentives to discriminate against foreigners when buying goods and services. We argue that “buy national” policies have unclear costs and are harder to attack than policies that visibly interfere with consumers’ ability to buy foreign goods. This makes such provisions more attractive than tariffs to democratic leaders seeking reelection. We thus hypothesize that democracy leads to lower tariffs but to greater discrimination in public procurement. We support this hypothesis with an analysis of procurement and imports in 138 countries from 1990 to 2008. Our results imply that a full understanding of the democracy--trade policy relationship requires attention to increasingly prominent behind-the-border barriers to trade. Date: 2014 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ginixx:v:40:y:2014:i:5:p:657-682 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/03050629.2014.899220 Access Statistics for this article International Interactions is currently edited by Michael Colaresi and Gerald Schneider More articles in International Interactions from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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