Trade and Growth: An Empirical Investigation

Jeffrey A. Frankel, David Romer

NBER Working Paper No. 5476
Issued in March 1996
NBER Program(s):Economic Fluctuations and Growth Program, International Finance and Macroeconomics Program

Countries' geographic characteristics have important effects on their trade, and are plausibly uncorrelated with other determinants of their incomes. 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 suggest that ordinary least squares estimates understate the effects of trade, and that trade has a quantitatively large, significant, and robust positive effect on income.

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w5476

Published: American Economic Review, Vol. 89, no. 3 (June 1999): 379-399.(Published under title "Does Trade Cause Growth?")

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