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KDI 경제교육·정보센터

ENG
  • 경제배움
  • Economic

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    and Education

    Center

최신자료
A Democratic Dividend in Trade? Evidence from a Flexible Empirical Implementation
CEPR
2025.03.14
We study the causal effect of country-specific democratic regime change on bilateral trade flows, extending structural gravity empirics to ‘heterogeneous gravity‘ estimated at the country-pair level. Our difference-in-differences implementation accounts for selection into regime change, multilateral resistance, globalisation effects, and spatial dependence. We find average effects of 46% higher exports for countries after thirty years in democracy, but demonstrate that these effects are driven by the democratic dividend for income: the causal chain runs from democracy to economic prosperity to trade, and democracy appears to have a limited ‘direct‘ effect on trade flows.