TY  - JOUR
AU  - Rodriguez,Francisco
AU  - Rodrik,Dani
TI  - Trade Policy and Economic Growth:  A Skeptic's Guide to Cross-National Evidence
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 7081
PY  - 1999
Y2  - April 1999
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7081
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7081.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Francisco Rodriguez
E-Mail: primofrank@hotmail.com

Dani Rodrik
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-9454
Fax: 617/496-5747
E-Mail: dani_rodrik@harvard.edu
AB  - Do countries with lower policy-induced barriers to international trade grow faster, once other relevant country characteristics are controlled for?  There exists a large empirical literature providing an affirmative answer to this question.  We argue that methodological problems with the empirical strategies employed in this literature leave the results open to diverse interpretations.  In many cases, the indicators of  openness' used by researchers are poor measures of trade barriers or are highly correlated with other sources of bad economic performance. In other cases, the methods used to ascertain the link between trade policy and growth have serious shortcomings.  Papers that we review include Dollar (1992), Ben-David (1993), Sachs and Warner (1995), and Edwards (1998).  We find little evidence that open trade policies--in the sense of lower tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade--are significantly associated with economic growth.
ER  -