Trade liberalization, economic activity and political violence in the Global South: evidence from PTAs

Francesco Amodio, Leonardo Baccini, Giorgio Chiovelli and Michele Di Maio

Economic Policy, 2024, vol. 39, issue 118, 275-322

Abstract: SummaryThis paper investigates the impact of agricultural trade liberalization on economic activity and political violence in emerging countries. We use data on all preferential trade agreements (PTAs) signed between 25 low- and middle-income countries and their high-income trade partners between 1995 and 2013. We exploit the implied reduction in agricultural tariffs over time combined with variation within countries in their suitability to produce liberalized crops to find that economic activity increases differentially in affected areas. We also find strong positive effects on political violence, and present evidence consistent with both producer- and consumer-side mechanisms: violence increases differentially in more urbanized areas that are suitable to produce less labour-intensive crops as well as crops that are consumed locally. Our estimates imply that economic activity and political violence would have been around 2% and 7% lower, respectively, across countries in our sample had the PTAs not been signed.

Keywords: D22; D24; F51; N45; O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/epolic/eiae024 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Trade Liberalization, Economic Activity, and Political Violence in the Global South: Evidence from PTAs (2023)
Working Paper: Trade Liberalization, Economic Activity, and Political Violence in the Global South: Evidence from PTAs (2023)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:ecpoli:v:39:y:2024:i:118:p:275-322.

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Policy is currently edited by Ghazala Azmat, Roberto Galbiati, Isabelle Mejean and Moritz Schularick

More articles in Economic Policy from CEPR, CESifo, Sciences Po Contact information at EDIRC., CES Contact information at EDIRC., MSH Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().