Import Trade Liberalization and Economic Performance
Mustapha Nabli ()
Additional contact information
Mustapha Nabli: Social and Economic Development Group, The World Bank
No 9717, Working Papers from Economic Research Forum
Abstract:
An important feature of the empirical evidence on trade liberalization experiences is their association with other reforms. And a major shortcoming of most, if not all, studies of the impact of trade liberalization on economic performance has been their inability to disentangle the effects of the many factors involved. This paper assesses the effects of import liberalization on economic performance by controlling for the macroeconomic stabilization factor, and taking account of the extent and content of the trade liberalization. The impact of liberalization is analyzed through a comparison of a number of economic indicators before and after initiation of reform. Regression analysis is also used, based on a GDP growth type equation from the new economic growth literature. Our analysis shows that import liberalization, when not associated with macroeconomic stabilization, may have significant positive effects on economic performance but they depend in important ways on the type of reform in terms of content and extent. The analysis also shows that import liberalization may have significant adjustment costs in terms of reduced growth and/or reduced investment and higher unemployment.
Date: 1997-06-11, Revised 1997-06-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Published by The Economic Research Forum (ERF)
Downloads: (external link)
http://bit.ly/2t7fnyg (text/html)
Related works:
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:erg:wpaper:9717
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from Economic Research Forum Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Namees Nabeel ().