American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Does Trade Cause Growth?
American Economic Review
vol. 89,
no. 3, June 1999
(pp. 379–399)
(Complimentary)
Abstract
Examining the correlation between trade and income cannot identify the direction of causation between the two. Countries' geographic characteristics, however, have important effects on trade and are plausibly uncorrelated with other determinants of income. This paper, therefore, constructs measures of the geographic component of countries' trade and uses those measures to obtain instrumental variables estimates of the effect of trade on income. The results provide no evidence that ordinary least-squares estimates overstate the effects of trade. Further, they suggest that trade has a quantitatively large and robust, though only moderately statistically significant, positive effect on income.Citation
Frankel, Jeffrey, A., and David H. Romer. 1999. "Does Trade Cause Growth?" American Economic Review, 89 (3): 379–399. DOI: 10.1257/aer.89.3.379Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- F43 Economic Growth of Open Economies
- O41 One, Two, and Multisector Growth Models