Openness and Growth Whats The Empirical

This PDF is a selection from a published volume from the
National Bureau of Economic Research
Volume Title: Challenges to Globalization: Analyzing the

Economics
Volume Author/Editor: Robert E. Baldwin and L. Alan Winters,

editors
Volume Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Volume ISBN: 0-262-03615-4
Volume URL: http://www.nber.org/books/bald04-1
Conference Date: May 24-25, 2002
Publication Date: February 2004
Title: Openness and Growth: What’s the Empirical Relationship?
Author: Robert E. Baldwin
URL: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c9548
13
Openness and Growth: What’s
the Empirical Relationship?
Robert E. Baldwin
13.1 Introduction
The manner in which the international economic policies of govern-
ments affect the rates of growth of their economies has long been a subject
of controversy. This situation continues today. Despite a number of multi-
country case studies utilizing comparable analytical frameworks, numer-
ous econometric studies using large cross-country data sets, and important
theoretical advances concerning how a country’s international economic
policies and its rate of economic growth interact, there is still disagreement
among economists concerning the nature of the relationship.
There are several reasons for this. A key one is the difference among in-
vestigators in the manner they define the issue being studied. Some authors
focus on whether there is a causal relationship between such variables as in-
creases in trade or foreign direct investment and increases in growth rates
(or between increases in growth and increases in trade or investment), no
matter what the reasons for the changes in these economic variables. How-
ever, most authors are interested in the effects of differences in government
policies on economic growth. The impact of policies affecting the “open-
ness” of a country to trade and investment, or its “inward orientation” or
“outward orientation,” is the subject of many studies. But, of course, just
how broadly one defines such terms greatly affects one’s conclusions about
a particular country or set of countries. One can interpret openness in nar-
row terms to include only import and export taxes or subsidies as well as
explicit nontariff distortions of trade, or in varying degrees of broadness to
Robert E. Baldwin is Hilldale Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the University of Wis-

consin-Madison and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research
(NBER).
499
500 Robert E. Baldwin
cover such matters as exchange-rate policies, domestic taxes and subsidies,

competition and other regulatory policies, education policies, the nature of
the legal system, the form of government, and the general nature of insti-
tutions and culture.
Differences in the quality and detail of the data being analyzed are an-
other source of disagreement among economists on the subject. Those who
study trade and growth relationships among developing countries are
greatly hampered by the lack of good data even on such matters as levels of
import protection, and they often are forced to undertake case studies.
While many insights have been revealed from such studies about the nature
of the development process and its relationship with trade, some are reluc-
tant to draw broad generalizations from them because of their specificity
and the bias that the personal viewpoints of the authors may introduce into
the analyses. In contrast, while econometric analyses based on quantitative
data concerning trade and growth for a cross-section of countries do per-
mit broad generalizations, these studies are limited by the scope and com-
parability of available quantitative data. Differences in what investigators
regard as appropriate econometric models and tests for sensitivity of the
results to alternative specifications that may be based in part on the per-
sonal policy predilections of the authors can also result in significant
differences in the conclusions reached under such quantitative approaches.
The purpose of this paper is to survey briefly the views of economists and
policymakers since around the end of World War II concerning the rela-
tionships between economic openness and growth, indicating how and
why these views have significantly changed over the last fifty years and
pointing out the main reasons for the disagreements. Section 13.2 exam-
ines the 1950s and 1960s when import substitution was the dominant
growth policy in the developing countries and there was also extensive gov-
ernment intervention in many industrial countries aimed at influencing
growth rates. Section 13.3 considers the period from the 1970s into the
1990s, in which the findings from an increasing number of studies of the
growth experiences of individual countries caused more and more econo-
mists and policymakers to become skeptical about the growth merits of im-
port substitution policies and to begin to advocate more export-oriented,
outward-looking trade policies. Section 13.4 briefly outlines some of the
new relationships between trade and growth brought out by the so-called
new growth literature of the late 1980s and early 1990s which, together with
the development of new econometric techniques for dealing with time se-
ries data, has stimulated new efforts to unravel the relationships between
trade and growth through cross-country statistical analyses. Section 13.5
briefly reviews the major studies of this period, all of which reach the gen-
eral conclusion that openness is associated with higher growth rates. This
conclusion has, however, been recently challenged in a detailed, carefully
reasoned critique of these papers by Rodriguez and Rodrik (2001). These
Openness and Growth: What’s the Empirical Relationship? 501
authors contend that, in fact, because of various methodological short-

comings in these studies, one should conclude that there is very little
evidence that trade openness is significantly associated with economic
growth. Section 13.5 summarizes the criticisms of the paper by Rodriguez
and Rodrik. Section 13.6 concludes with an evaluation of the new studies
and the critique by Rodriguez and Rodrik.
13.2 The Widespread Acceptance of Import-Substitution Policies

as the Means to Stimulate Economic Growth
As more and more countries obtained their independence from the colo-
nial powers in the period shortly after the end of World War II, a wide-
spread view developed among economists and policymakers that the best
way for these countries to develop more rapidly was to stimulate industri-
alization by adopting import-substitution policies. There seemed to be
a number of good reasons for such an approach at the time. The political
leaders of the newly independent nations were keenly aware not only that
most of the countries from whom they obtained independence had much
higher per capita income levels and were much more industrialized, but
that their former rulers had imposed economic policies in the past which
discouraged industrialization within the new nations. To these new leaders,
industrialization seemed to offer the possibility of achieving faster growth,
higher per capita income levels, and the attainment of the economic and
military power needed for national security.
An economically sensible way of achieving industrialization seemed to
be to restrict imports of manufactured goods for which there already was
a domestic demand, in order both to shift this demand toward domestic
producers and to permit the use of the country’s primary-product export
earnings to import the capital goods needed for industrialization. There
also appeared to be a number of examples where high levels of import pro-
tection in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had contributed posi-
tively to industrialization. Although Great Britain had adopted a policy of
free trade during its period of rapid growth in the nineteenth century, the
United States seemed to industrialize and prosper by imposing high im-
port duties on manufactures for much of the later part of the nineteenth
century. Germany and France also adopted protectionist policies during
this period, as did Japan after 1900.1 The impressive degree of industrial-
ization achieved by the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s and by China
after 1949 by pursuing inward-looking policies were additional historical
examples that impressed the leaders of the newly independent nations.
The so-called infant industry argument first set forth in 1791 by Alexan-
1. See O’Rourke (2000) and Clemens and Williamson (2001) for evidence supporting the
positive effects of tariffs on growth. Also see Irwin (2002) for some contrary evidence.
der Hamilton (1913), further elaborated by Friedrich List (1856), and ac-
cepted by many classical and neoclassical economists as the major theo-
retically valid exception to the case for worldwide free trade provided eco-
nomic support for import-substitution policies. John Stuart Mill, who first
formalized the argument in economic terms, argued that it takes time for
new producers in a country to become “educated to the level of those with
whom the processes are traditional” and thus for their unit costs to decline.
The infant industry argument maintains that during the temporary period
when domestic costs in an industry are above the product’s import price, a
tariff is a socially desirable method of financing the investment in human
resources needed to compete successfully with foreign producers.
Soon after World War II, Raul Prebisch (1950), the secretary general of
the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and later
the founder and secretary general of the United Nations Conference on
Trade and Development (UNCTAD), among others argued that the infant
industry argument was applicable to the entire manufacturing sector and
not just to a single industry. He also claimed that an ongoing secular de-
cline in the prices of primary products (the exports of the less-developed
countries) relative to the prices of manufactured goods (the exports of the
developed countries) and the low elasticity of demand for primary prod-
ucts made expansion in the production of primary products unattractive.
Focusing on producing labor-intensive manufactured goods, for example,
clothing, for export purposes also did not appeal to most less-developed
countries at this time because of the belief that a balanced industrial struc-
ture, such as existed in most developed countries, was necessary to achieve
their goal of high per capita income levels and, moreover, because high lev-
els of import duties and other import barriers still existed in the developed
countries on most of these goods.
Although most economic leaders of less-developed countries looked fa-
vorably on the strategy of import substitution, they also often found them-
selves backed into such a policy somewhat inadvertently. Because of the
shortage of goods these countries suffered during World War II and the
economic expansion plans of their new leaders, there was a tremendous de-
mand on their part for both capital goods and consumer goods. This meant
that their existing foreign exchange reserves were quickly used up, with cur-
rent export earnings being unable to fill the gap between demand and
supply at existing exchange rates. Consequently, most of these countries
felt forced to impose foreign exchange and import controls to conserve
their available export earnings and to establish a rationing system for the
available foreign exchange to ensure that consumer necessities such as food
and medicine, key intermediate inputs such as fuel, and essential capital
goods could be imported in sufficient quantities to prevent serious politi-
cal unrest and still permit the pursuit of their development goals. One con-
sequence was that very high levels of implicit protection were put in place
on so-called nonessential manufactured goods.
Import substitution policies actually worked quite well initially. The
high prices of imported nonessentials shifted domestic demand for these
goods from foreign to local producers with the result that there were sig-
nificant increases in the output of simple manufactured goods as govern-
ments provided domestic producers with the foreign exchange needed to
import key intermediate inputs and capital goods. Many manufacturing
activities consisted largely of simply assembling the components of goods
produced abroad, for example, cars. Since the production of most of these
products intensively utilized the type of labor that was relatively abundant
in the newly industrializing nations, namely, unskilled labor, the adverse
effects on economic efficiency of these early import substitution efforts
were not sufficient to offset the growth effects of the import substitution
policies. Moreover, in this early period, the overvalued domestic currencies
resulting from the tight exchange controls and expansionary production
policies not only did not seem to reduce earnings from primary-product
exports significantly, but kept import prices of needed capital goods and
intermediate inputs relatively low.
As import-substitution policies continued and a number of developing
countries extended these policies to cover more and more intermediate
inputs and capital goods, the drawbacks of such a policy approach became
increasingly apparent. In particular, the hardships imposed on the export
sector began to have adverse growth effects. An overvalued currency meant
that the number of units of foreign exchange received by exporters re-
mained low while, at the same time, these producers were forced to pur-
chase more and more intermediate inputs and capital goods domestically
at high prices. The resulting squeeze on profit margins forced them to cur-
tail export production. The higher skill and technology requirements for
the more complex intermediates and capital goods and the lack of large
domestic markets needed to achieve efficient levels of production of these
goods also worsened the profit outlook for domestic producers. At the
same time, aggressive expansionary activities by governments and private
businesses fueled greater inflationary pressures, with the result that large
government budget deficits and balance-of-payments deficits became
commonplace. The ensuing budget and balance-of-payments crises were
often met by still tighter controls over exchange rates and imports and
more extensive government intervention in the economy. The net outcome
was generally a slowing in the growth rate compared to the early period of
import substitution.
Given the widespread agreement among economists today that the im-
port-substitution strategy did not work out well for most developing coun-
tries, an important question to ask is why so many economists were wrong
in their predictions that such an approach would be successful in raising

long-run growth rates for these countries. What went wrong with our ana-
lytical thinking? In my view, two mistakes we made were an uncritical ac-
ceptance of the infant industry argument and a failure to take account
of the macroeconomic consequences of such a policy when applied to all
manufacturing.2
Consider the argument set forth earlier that new producers need to be
protected for a temporary period so they can acquire the experience and
production skills that will make them as efficient as their long-time foreign
competitors. As James Meade (1955) pointed out many years ago, the ex-
istence during the early period of production of higher costs than those of
foreign competitors is, by itself, an insufficient reason to justify tariff pro-
tection on economic efficiency grounds. If unit costs in an industry are low
enough after the learning period to yield a discounted surplus of revenues
over costs (and thus indicate a comparative advantage for the country in
producing the product), it should be possible for firms to raise sufficient
funds in the capital market to cover their initial excess of expenditures over
revenues. These circumstances are no different from those in which firms
go to the capital market for funds to cover the excess of expenditures over
receipts during the early stages of production because of the need to pur-
chase indivisible units of physical capital. Imperfections in capital markets
may prevent access to capital markets but the existence of market imper-
fections is quite a different case for government intervention than the in-
fant industry argument.
As Meade (1955) also noted, the key argument on which the infant in-
dustry case must rest relates to technological externalities associated with
the learning process. For example, consider the matter of acquiring the
knowledge about local production techniques needed to compete effectively
with foreign producers. An entrepreneur who incurs these costs of discov-
ering the best way to produce a particular good faces the problem that this
information may become freely available to other potential local producers,
who can utilize it at the same time as the initial firm but without incurring
the full costs of the knowledge acquisition. Competition from these other
producers could then either drive up factor prices or push down the prod-
uct’s price to levels where the initial firm is unable to recover its costs of gain-
ing this knowledge. Realizing that this outcome is possible, firms will be dis-
couraged from undertaking the initial knowledge-acquisition costs.3
The imposition of a temporary protective duty is, however, no guaran-
tee that individual entrepreneurs will undertake additional investment in
knowledge acquisition. An import tax raises the domestic price of a prod-
2. Also see Krueger (1997).

3. See Baldwin (1969) for a more complete discussion of this point and its policy implica-
tions. Hausmann and Rodrik (2002) have also recently discussed the development implica-
tions of this externality problem.
uct and, from the viewpoint of the industry as a whole, makes some invest-
ments in knowledge more profitable. But individual producers still face the
same externality problem as before, namely, that other firms will copy, with
little cost to themselves, any new technical knowledge discovered by the
firm and drive the product’s price down to a level where the initial firm will
be unable to recoup its costs of acquiring this knowledge. If there were
always some technologically fixed time lag between the introduction of
a new, cheaper production technique and the change in product or fac-
tor prices caused by the entry of the firms who copy the new production
method, a duty would operate to make investment in knowledge acquisi-
tion more profitable for the individual firm in the industry. But, to make a
point too often ignored in such discussions, the speed with which firms re-
spond to market opportunities is itself a function of the level of profit
prospects. A duty will make it worthwhile for firms to incur the costs of ac-
quiring the knowledge discovered by other firms faster and also to move
into production more rapidly at high output levels. What is needed, of
course, is a subsidy to the initial entrants into the industry for the purpose
of discovering the better production techniques.
Up to the post–World War II period when some economists began to ex-
tend the infant industry argument to all manufacturing, economists had
generally framed this argument for temporary protection in partial equi-
librium terms. It focused on a single industry, and it was assumed that the
temporary import protection granted had no appreciable effect on such
macroeconomic variables as exchange rates, aggregate exports and im-
ports, and monetary or fiscal policies. Early proponents of aggressively
protecting large segments of the manufacturing sector did not fully appre-
ciate the implications of their policy suggestions on these macroeconomic
variables. They did not, for example, take sufficient account of the adverse
effects of import substitution on aggregate exports and, thus, on the for-
eign exchange earnings so essential for importing the capital goods and es-
sential intermediate inputs needed to permit the expansion of the manu-
facturing sector. Nor did they realize the extent to which government
actions to conserve foreign exchange by limiting imports of luxury con-
sumer goods would make the domestic production of these goods the most
attractive for domestic entrepreneurs and thus bias the pattern of produc-
tion in a direction that the government did not particularly want. They also
failed to appreciate the extent of the budget and inflationary pressures that
would be generated by the development actions of governments and do-
mestic producers. Indeed, it was the macroeconomic crises associated with
unsustainable import deficits for central banks, unmanageable govern-
ment budget deficits, runaway inflation, and so on that had the greater
effect in finally turning most countries away from import-substitution poli-
cies than a realization of the serious resource misallocation effects of these
policies.
13.3 The Shift to Outward-Oriented Policies

The first group of developing countries to shift from an inward-oriented
to an outward-oriented approach to development were located in the Far
East, specifically Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea. (Hong Kong had
long pursued open trade and investment policies.) South Korea, for ex-
ample, was characterized by extensive quantitative controls over trade and
international payments from the time it separated from North Korea in
1945 through the end of the Korean War in 1953. Inward-looking actions
continued to dominate government development policy after 1953, with an
increasingly elaborate multiple exchange rate system being established in
the attempt to deal with the problems of a large trade deficit and an over-
valued exchange rate.4 While a large currency devaluation took place in
1961 along with efforts to liberalize the trade and payments system, this lib-
eralization effort ended in 1963 as rapid inflation was fed by excessively ex-
pansionary fiscal policies and a poor crop. However, a further liberalization
effort begun in 1964 and 1965 was much more successful, so that by 1966 the
trade and payments regime was fairly liberal compared with earlier years.
The country became increasingly outward oriented as the government
adopted other policies that encouraged exports of manufactured goods.
Even though they undertook periodic attempts to liberalize their trade
and payments regimes, most other developing countries continued to fol-
low what was basically an import-substitution approach to growth until
the 1980s. However, the debt crisis of 1982 convinced many developing-
country governments that inward-looking policies were no longer sustain-
able, particularly for smaller countries. They had borrowed heavily in
international markets in order to cope with the trade-deficit problem asso-
ciated with the import-substitution approach only to find that the high and
sustainable growth rates sought still did not materialize and, instead, that
they were left with massive international debts they could no longer ser-
vice. Such traditional adherents to the import-substitution approach as Ar-
gentina, Chile, Mexico, Turkey, Ghana, and Uganda began to adopt more
outward-looking policies.
While the inability to borrow the funds needed to reestablish their im-
port-substitution regimes and the remarkable growth record of more and
more East Asian countries under outward-oriented policies were probably
the main immediate reasons for the shift in growth policy, the gradual shift
in thinking by economists both in academia and in international organiza-
tions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and even
the United Nations Commission for Latin America in favor of outward-
looking over inward-looking policies also was an important factor.
4. See Frank, Kim, and Westphal (1975) for a detailed discussion of Korea’s development
experience during this period.
This change in conventional thinking by economists and policymakers

about the best policy approach to promote growth in the developing coun-
tries was significantly influenced by a series of detailed country studies
together with some cross-country statistical analyses of the import-
substitution process and by new theoretical modeling of the interactions
between trade and growth. Both the studies of commercial policies in de-
veloping countries directed by Little, Scitovsky, and Scott (1970) and by
Balassa and Associates (1971) utilized the newly formalized concept of the
effective rate of protection to compare import-substitution policies across
industries and countries.5 This concept measures protection on a value-
added basis rather than on the basis of the final price of a product and thus
takes account of the level of protection on intermediate inputs as well as
the final product. It brings out the point that, if a good is exported without
any export subsidy but the exporter must purchase protected, domestically
produced intermediate inputs, the primary factors involved in the value-
added process are actually penalized compared to free trade. Similarly, if
there are no duties on the intermediate inputs or they are lower than those
on the final product, the primary factors producing the value-added are
protected to a greater degree than the rate of protection on the final prod-
uct indicates.
Both the Little, Scitovsky, and Scott (1970) and Balassa and Associates
(1971) studies brought out the fact that the average rate of protection of
value-added in manufacturing was extraordinarily high in most developing
countries—much higher than nominal rates of protection and often ex-
ceeding 100 percent. Moreover, there was great variability among indus-
tries and broad sectors that often seemed to make little economic sense. An
extreme example was Chile’s effective rate of protection in 1961 of 2,884
percent for processed foods in contrast to 300 percent for nondurable con-
sumer goods (Balassa and Associates 1971, 54). Perhaps most important,
however, was the degree to which the studies demonstrated the discrimina-
tion against exports, mainly agricultural and mineral products. In some
countries, there actually were negative rates of protection in these sectors,
for example, agriculture in Pakistan and mining and energy in Malaysia
(see Balassa and Associates 1971, 54). Both sets of studies recommended
reducing the average levels of effective protection and, in particular, reduc-
ing the discrimination against exports.
Two other noteworthy studies of developing countries were ones directed
by Krueger (1978) and Bhagwati (1978) and by Papageorgiou, Michaely,
and Choksi (1991). These studies investigated particular episodes of in-
ward-looking and outward-looking policy actions by considering not only
5. The countries covered by the studies directed by Little, Scitovsky, and Scott (1970) were
Argentina, Brazil, India, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Taiwan, while those investi-
gated by Balassa and Associates were Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philip-
pines, and for comparison, a developed country, Norway.
changes in levels of import protection and export subsidization but the

array of macroeconomic policies utilized by governments (e.g., monetary
policy, fiscal policy, and especially exchange rate policy) to promote import
substitution or deal with its consequences. The Bhagwati-Krueger project
focused on the effective exchange rates faced by importers and exporters,
that is, the nominal rates for imports and exports corrected for various ex-
port subsidies and for import tariffs and nontariff barriers, respectively.6
Following broad guidelines, the individual country-researchers in the Pa-
pageorgiou, Michaely, and Choksi (1991) study were asked to construct an
annual index of the degree of trade liberalization.7 Both these sets of stud-
ies reached the same conclusion as the two earlier ones, namely, that im-
port-substitution policies generally do not produce sustainable increases in
long-run growth rates and that outward-looking policies are more appro-
priate for achieving this goal. They also both go into considerable detail
about the process of moving from inward-looking to outward-looking
policies and, in particular, the sequencing of trade and exchange-rate liber-
alization and the set of other policies, such as monetary, fiscal, and compe-
tition policies, that should accompany the liberalization process.
There were also cross-country econometric studies in the 1970s and
1980s that attempted to test the relationship between trade and economic
growth. For example, using information from the country studies that he
directed, Balassa and Associates (1978) regressed the growth rate of ex-
ports on the growth of output, both including and excluding exports from
the measure of output. He found the strongest positive relationship when
exports are included as part of output, but he also found a generally sig-
nificant positive effect when exports are excluded from gross national prod-
uct (GNP). Krueger (1978, chap. 11) also finds that when the growth of ex-
ports was faster the growth of GNP was also faster. She did not find,
however, that the extent of trade and exchange rate liberalization indepen-
dently affects growth. Using data based on the indexes of liberalization in
the Papageorgiou, Michaely, and Choksi (1991) study, Kessides (1991)
runs a number of regressions relating liberalization and growth. Among
his findings are that strong liberalization episodes are associated with
higher increases in the rate of gross domestic product (GDP) growth than
weaker episodes and that countries with sustained liberalization episodes
experienced larger increases in the rates of GDP growth than countries
with failed liberalization episodes.
As this brief survey of individual country studies and cross-country sta-
6. This study resulted in published volumes that analyzed Chile, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana,
India, Israel, Korea, the Philippines, and Turkey.
7. The countries included in this effort were Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Greece,
Indonesia, Israel, Korea, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Portugal, Singapore,
Spain, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia. Most studies covered the period from
around 1950 to the early 1980s.
tistical analyses of inward-looking versus outward-looking policies indi-

cates, the many differences among researchers, both in the issues examined
and in the economic techniques employed, make it difficult to draw many
firm conclusions. One generalization that seems warranted is that the im-
port-substitution approach was not successful in promoting appreciably
higher growth rates on a long-run, sustainable basis for developing coun-
tries that wanted to participate in the global economy. Most countries that
used this approach were forced eventually to abandon it because of chronic
balance-of-payments and budget deficit problems. Those that have basi-
cally stuck with an inward-looking approach over the years (e.g., Pakistan,
Burma, and Zimbabwe) have had relatively lower growth rates. In contrast,
although many developing countries that switched to outward-looking
policies were also often forced to abandon these policies temporarily be-
cause of unexpected external events or domestic political pressures related
to the adjustment problems involved, those that were able to sustain these
policies over long periods seem to have grown more rapidly. Another point
that stands out in the various country studies is that outward-looking and
inward-looking policies involve much more than just trade and trade poli-
cies. For example, a willingness to welcome foreign direct investment, to
maintain market-oriented exchange rates, to keep the money supply under
fairly tight control, to constrain government budget deficits and corrup-
tion, and to control monopolistic behavior by firms and industries all seem
to be important components of outward-looking development policies.
Attempting to isolate the relative importance on growth of a particular
component such as the volume of exports or liberal versus protectionist
trade policies does not seem to make much sense, since there are complex
interrelationships among these types of policies that make them highly in-
tercorrelated. In his influential review of the various investigations of trade
and growth through the early 1990s, Edwards (1993) is especially critical of
the early cross-country statistical studies, which he argues are based on
overly simplistic theoretical models and also are flawed for various econo-
metric reasons. More recently, Srinivasan and Bhagwati (2001) have also
sharply criticized cross-country regression analyses as the basis of deter-
mining the relationships between trade openness and growth. In their view,
due to the weak theoretical foundations of most of these studies, the poor
quality of the databases they must use, and inappropriate econometric
techniques utilized in many instances, nuanced, in-depth studies of coun-
try experiences are the best approach for understanding the linkage be-
tween trade and growth.
13.4 Openness and the New Growth Theory

Under the traditional comparative-statics framework, either in the ab-
sence or presence of economic distortions, changes in trade policy lead
only to one-time changes in levels of production, although in the real world

of economic frictions one might expect to observe the shift to new equi-
libria taking place only over a number of years. Similarly, trade-policy
changes in the standard neoclassical model of exogenous growth bring
about changes in the pattern of product specialization but not in the
steady-state rate of growth. An important analytical development in the
latter part of the 1980s and early 1990s, however, was the significant im-
provement in endogenous growth theory by such authors as Romer (1986),
Lucas (1988), and Grossman and Helpman (1991). Part of this new growth
theory focused on the relationships between international trade and
growth. One of the models of Grossman and Helpman (chap. 6) illustrates
the types of relationships stressed in the new growth theory and, in partic-
ular, how trade policy can affect growth rates. To keep the model as simple
as possible, they assume that each country is “small” in the sense of facing
fixed world prices for the two final goods produced. There are two factors
of production, human capital (skilled labor) and unskilled labor whose
supplies are fixed. One of the final goods is produced with human capital
and a fixed amount of differentiated, nontraded intermediate inputs, while
the other is produced with unskilled labor and the same bundle of inter-
mediate inputs. The nontraded intermediate inputs are produced under
monopolistically competitive conditions with both factors of production.
Constant returns to scale prevail for final and intermediate goods.
Human capital is also involved in the research and development (R&D)
activities that create new varieties of intermediate goods. These intermedi-
ate inputs are the key to increased productivity: Each final good requires a
given aggregate of intermediates but the more varieties there are in this ag-
gregate, the higher output becomes. This captures the idea that dividing
tasks into smaller and smaller parts through specialization leads to in-
creasing returns. Another important aspect of the R&D process is that it
not only produces new varieties of intermediates but also adds to the stock
of knowledge, which is nonappropriable. The greater this stock of knowl-
edge, the less the quantity of human capital needed to produce new vari-
eties of intermediate inputs. Thus, the growth process is endogenous with
R&D creating new intermediate inputs that increase the productivity of
the needed aggregate of inputs and add to the stock of general knowledge.
In turn, the larger stock of knowledge reduces the amount of human capi-
tal needed for producing new varieties of intermediates. The equilibrium
outcome is a constant rate of growth of factor productivity and a constant
rate of output growth in the sectors producing the final goods.
Now consider the effects of a tariff on the imported good. If the country
is importing the good that only uses human capital as a direct input, and
exporting the good intensively using unskilled labor, the import duty will
raise the relative domestic price of the human capital–intensive good and
via the Stolper-Samuelson theorem raise the relative wages of skilled labor
(1941). This increase in the price of human capital will lower the level of
R&D activity by raising its costs and thus lead to a lower equilibrium
growth rate. In contrast, if the country imports the unskilled labor-
intensive goods, import protection will lower the relative wages of skilled
labor and accelerate the growth rate. Thus, in this model there is no definite
answer to whether protection increases or decreases the growth rate. It de-
pends on the pattern of imports and exports. Besides using the concept of
increasing returns as the driving force for endogenous growth, Grossman
and Helpman (1991) and other growth theorists have introduced such con-
cepts as knowledge spillovers resulting from trade in goods and foreign
direct investment as well as the ability to imitate the products of foreign
producers as engines of endogenous growth. Import protection generally
reduces growth rates under these formulations.
13.5 More Sophisticated Cross-Country Studies,

Yet Continued Disagreement
Motivated by the improvements in growth theory, the criticisms of ear-
lier statistical analyses, and the availability of more comprehensive data
and new econometric techniques, economists devoted renewed attention in
the 1990s to more sophisticated cross-country econometric analyses relat-
ing various measures of outwardness or openness to the growth rates of
GDP or total factor productivity. Almost all of these studies find a strong
positive relationship between outward-looking policies and growth. How-
ever, in an important detailed review of the most influential of these stud-
ies in which they focus on the effects of policy-induced trade barriers on
growth rather than on the growth effects of more general measures of open-
ness, Rodriguez and Rodrik (2001, 316) express skepticism “that there is a
strong negative relationship in the data between trade barriers and eco-
nomic growth, at least for levels of trade restrictions observed in practice”;
moreover, they “view the search for such a relationship as futile.” A unique
feature of the Rodriguez and Rodrik analysis is that they use the various
authors’ actual data sets in undertaking various tests of the robustness of
their results. The rest of this section examines the main studies reviewed by
Rodriguez and Rodrik (1999) and considers the criticisms they make of
these studies.
As Rodriguez and Rodrik point out, one of the most widely cited statis-
tical investigations of outward orientation and growth is by Dollar (1992).
(This paper was not covered in Edwards’ 1993 review.) Dollar bases his
measure of outward orientation on estimates of the comparative price lev-
els in ninety-five countries of an identical bundle of consumption goods
calculated by Summers and Heston (1988). As a means for eliminating that
part of the differences in prices among countries due to country differences
in the prices of nontradables, Dollar first regresses their price estimates on
the level and square of GDP per capita as well as regional dummies and
then compares the predicted price levels from this regression with the Sum-
mer and Heston prices. The argument is that if factor prices are not equal-
ized, the relative prices of nontradables should vary systematically with
differences in relative factor endowments. Since good data on relative fac-
tor endowments are not available for most less developed countries, he uses
per capita income as a measure of per capita factor availability. Even with
this procedure, he still finds significant anomalies for some countries with
respect to the degree of trade distortion produced by his comparative price
measure. However, when he combine this trade-distortion measure with a
measure of the degree of volatility of exchange rates, he finds that the num-
ber of anomalies declines substantially.
Trade economists have often explored the possibility of measuring the
degree of import protection or export subsidization by comparing domes-
tic prices across countries for specific traded goods. However, this has gen-
erally been rejected as an adequate method of measuring trade barriers,
since even for physically identical goods for which detailed direct informa-
tion on levels of protection or subsidization exists, price differences are
generally not good measures of differences in the degree of trade distor-
tions. Given this result and the rather rough method used to purge the
effects of the prices of nontradables in the Summers and Heston price mea-
sures, it is not surprising that Dollar finds that his price indexes do not yield
reasonable results for a number of countries. Combining these indexes with
a measure of the volatility of exchange rates may give more reasonable re-
sults but, as Rodriguez and Rodrik argue, his variability index seems to be
more a measure of economic instability at large rather than of trade orien-
tation alone.
To test for the relationship between growth and his measures of outward
orientation, Dollar regresses growth in per capita income in ninety-five
countries averaged over the period 1976–1985 on his trade-distortion and
exchange rate volatility measures as well as on the rate of investment in
these countries over the same period. He finds that the higher the level of
trade distortion and the greater the exchange rate variability for a country,
the lower the rate of per capita GDP growth. Rodriguez and Rodrik not
only have some theoretical criticisms of Dollar’s trade distortion index as
an appropriate measure of trade restrictions but find that the regression re-
sults for this index are not very robust to alternative specifications of the
growth equation. For example, when dummy variables are added for Latin
America, East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, the trade distortion measure
is not statistically significant. Adding initial per capita income and level of
education reduces the explanatory power of this variable even more. Fur-
thermore, when Rodriguez and Rodrik use the latest revision of the Sum-
mers and Heston database for the same countries and time period covered
by Dollar, the trade distortion index is not significant and has the wrong
sign even without the addition of regional dummies. However, the ex-
change rate variability index continues to be negative and statistically sig-
nificant under all specifications with both the new and old databases. Thus,
while Dollar has shown that exchange rate variability is negatively associ-
ated with growth rates, I agree with Rodriguez and Rodrik that he has not
demonstrated that outward orientation as one would expect this to be
affected by trade policies is significantly related to economic growth in the
developing countries he studied.
The next, equally influential study critiqued by Rodriguez and Rodrik
is by Sachs and Warner (1995). These authors construct a 0-1 dummy of
openness for seventy-nine countries that takes a 0 if any one of the follow-
ing five conditions holds over the period 1970–1989: average tariff rates are
over 40 percent on capital goods and intermediates, nontariff barriers
cover 40 percent or more of imports of capital goods and intermediates, the
country operates under a socialist economic system, there is a state mo-
nopoly of the country’s major exports, and the black-market premium on
its official exchange rate exceeded 20 percent in the 1980s or 1990s. A value
of 0 is viewed as indicating a closed economy, while a value of 1 indicates
an open economy. Controlling for such variables as the investment rate,
government spending as a fraction of GDP, secondary and primary
schooling, and number of revolutions and coups, Sachs and Warner find
their openness index to be positively related to the growth rate of per capita
GDP in a statistically significant sense.
In reanalyzing the Sachs and Warner data, Rodriguez and Rodrik find
that two of the five indicators provide most of this statistical significance:
the existence of a state monopoly of the country’s major exports and a
black-market foreign exchange premium of more than 20 percent. (Neither
the measure of tariff levels nor the coverage of nontariff trade barriers is
statistically significant when the different indicators of openness are en-
tered separately.) Moreover, they note that the state monopoly variable
covers only twenty-nine African countries undergoing structural adjust-
ment programs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and therefore is virtually
indistinguishable from the use of a sub-Saharan Africa dummy. As for the
statistical significance of the black-market premium, they argue that this
indicator is likely to be a measure of policy failure due to many other rea-
sons besides simply trade policy.
Another paper critiqued by Rodriguez and Rodrik is one by Edwards
(1998), the author of the previously mentioned review of the various stud-
ies on the trade and growth through the 1980s and early 1990s (i.e., Ed-
wards 1993). One of Edwards’ main criticisms in the 1993 paper of the
cross-country statistical studies in that period is their failure to test in a sys-
tematic way for the robustness of the results obtained. In his 1998 paper,
Edwards tries to remedy this shortcoming. He tests the robustness of the
extent to which nine different measures of trade policy are related to total
factor productivity growth. His nine measures of openness are (a) the
Warner-Sachs index just discussed; (b) a subjective World Bank classifica-
tion of trade strategies; (c) Learner’s (1988) index of openness based on the
residuals from regressions explaining trade flows; (d) the average black-
market premium on a country’s official foreign exchange rate; (e) average
levels of import tariffs calculated by UNCTAD and taken from Barro and
Lee (1994); (f) the average coverage of nontariff trade barriers taken from
the same source; (g) a subjective index of trade distortions formulated by
the Heritage Foundation; (h) the ratio of taxes on imports and exports to
total trade; and (i) a regression-based index of import distortions calcu-
lated by Wolf (1993). He regresses these nine different measures of open-
ness on estimates that he calculates of ten-year averages of total factor pro-
ductivity from 1960 to 1990 for ninety-three developed and developing
countries. Controlling for initial per capita GDP in 1965 and the average
number of years of education in 1965, he finds that six of the nine measures
of openness are statistically significant in the expected direction.
Rather ironically, given Edwards’ emphasis on the need to test for ro-
bustness by using alternative specifications, Rodriguez and Rodrik find
that his results are heavily dependent on the fact that he weighs his regres-
sions by per capita GDP. If one weighs by the log of per capita GDP and
uses White’s (1980) method of dealing with the heteroscedasticity problem,
the number of Edwards’ nine openness measures that are significant drops
to four out of nine. The four significant openness measures that are signif-
icant when White’s correction for heteroscedasticity is used are the World
Bank’s subjective classification of trade regimes, the black-market ex-
change rate premium, the subjective index of trade distortions calculated
by the Heritage Foundation, and the ratio of trade taxes to total trade.
With respect to the latter variable, Rodriguez and Rodrik find that recal-
culating this variable based on more recent data than was not available to
Edwards fails to yield a significant sign when introduced into the regres-
sion on total factor productivity. They also note that the Heritage Foun-
dation index was calculated for trade restrictions existing in 1996, whereas
Edwards’ estimates cover the decade of the 1980s. When they calculate a
similar index that is based on 1980s data, it is no longer statistically signif-
icant in explaining the growth rate of total factor productivity. They also
object to the use of this measure as well as the one from the World Bank as
being subjective measures that they believe are “apparently highly con-
taminated by judgement biases or lack robustness to use of more credible
information from alternative data sources” (Rodriguez and Rodrik, 2000,
301). Finally, as mentioned earlier, they regard changes in the exchange
rate premium as being influenced more by basic macroeconomic policies
than trade policies.
Two additional recent papers on the subject are by Frankel and Romer
(1999) and by Dollar and Kraay (June 2001). Frankel and Romer directly
address the question: Does trade cause growth? Like others, they point out
that the ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions of per capita income on
the ratio of exports or imports and other variables, which generally find a
positive relationship between trade shares and income per person, may not
indicate the effect of trade on growth due to the endogeneity of the trade
share. Countries whose incomes are high for reasons not related to trade
may have high trade ratios. They therefore use geographic characteristics
of countries that they believe are not influenced by incomes or government
policies and other factors affecting income to obtain instrumental vari-
ables estimates of trade’s effect on income. Specifically, they include in their
trade equation the size of countries, their distance from each other,
whether they share a border, and whether they are landlocked. Their main
finding is that there is no evidence that OLS estimates overstate the effects
of trade. They are careful to point out, however, that this does not mean
that changes in trade resulting from policy actions affect growth in the
same manner as from their geographic variables, because there are many
different mechanisms by which trade can affect income. But they argue (see
Frankel and Romer 1999, 395) that the effects of geography-based differ-
ences in trade are “at least suggestive about the effects of policy-induced
differences.”
Rodriguez and Rodrik also critique this paper and argue that the geo-
graphically constructed measure by Frankel and Romer may not be a valid
instrumental variable. The reason is that geography is likely to be a deter-
minant of income through many more channels than just trade. For ex-
ample, distance from the equator affects public health and thus productiv-
ity through exposure to various diseases. When they include distance from
the equator or percentage of land in the tropics, or a set of regional dum-
mies in the Frankel and Romer instrumental variables income regressions,
their constructed trade-share variable is no longer statistically significant.
However, Frankel and Romer report that when they also include distance
from the equator as a control variable there is still no evidence that OLS re-
gressions overstate the influence of trade on income.
The final paper considered here is one by Dollar and Kraay (2003). The
unique feature of their regression analysis is its focus on within-country
(rather than cross-country) decadal changes in growth rates and changes
in the volume of trade. Because of this approach, the authors maintain that
their results are not driven by geography or other unobserved country
characteristics that influence growth but vary little over time. They also ar-
gue that their instrumentation strategy deals with the possibility of reverse
causation from growth to trade. Their data consist of 274 observations
over three decades from roughly 100 countries.
Dollar and Kraay find a strong and significant positive relationship be-
tween changes in trade and changes in growth. Moreover, they believe
“that we can at least cautiously ascribe some of the growth effects of trade
to underlying trade liberalizing policies that countries have undertaken”

(Dollar and Kraay 2003, 151). However, when they introduce institutional
factors along with trade as explanatory factors of changes in growth, they
find it difficult to disentangle the partial causal effects of institutions and
trade separately, using these factors as instruments. They conclude, there-
fore, “that both trade and institutions are important in understanding
cross-country differences in growth rates in the very long run, but the avail-
able cross-country variation is not very informative about the relative im-
portance of each” (Dollar and Kraay 2003, 161).
13.6 Conclusions
What are we to conclude from this survey of empirical studies about the
relationships between openness and growth, besides the fact that there is
disagreement among economists on the matter? As noted in the introduc-
tory section, a key reason for the disagreement seems to relate to differ-
ences among authors in what they mean by the concept of openness. Ro-
driguez and Rodrik, for example, focus on the relationship between growth
and trade openness, as reflected by “policy-induced barriers to interna-
tional trade” (2001, 264). In appraising the various studies they cover, they
consider levels of import duties and measures of the restrictiveness of non-
tariff barriers to be the most appropriate indicators of trade openness.
They are aware, however, of the limitations of the existing measures of
these indicators of trade openness. Simple tariff averages weighted by im-
ports tend to underweight the restrictiveness of high tariffs due to the low
level of imports. (A tariff so high that there are no imports is a case in
point.) Available comprehensive measures of nontariff barriers only mea-
sure the number of different types of nontariff trade barriers that a coun-
try has introduced and thus do not distinguish between the degrees of re-
strictiveness of these measures.
In contrast to Rodriguez and Rodrik, most authors both of studies of de-
velopment episodes in particular countries and of statistical analyses of
such periods across a large number of countries study much more than just
the effects of trade policies. The country studies led by Bhagwati and
Krueger and Papageorgiou, Michaely, and Choksi, for example, specifi-
cally focus on exchange rates as well as trade barriers and also examine the
monetary, fiscal, and regulatory policies that accompanied market-
opening or market-closing episodes. This is why these writers as well as
those undertaking cross-country statistical studies describe the effects of
the policies they are studying on a country in terms of such broad phrases
as its outward orientation and openness in describing the policies they are
studying. However, according to Rodriguez and Rodrik: “To the extent
that the empirical literature demonstrates a positive causal link from open-
ness to growth, the main operational implication is that governments

should dismantle their barriers to trade” (2001, 264).
Most of the authors of this literature would, I think, strongly object to
this narrow interpretation of the policy implications of their work. While
they generally favor the reduction of high tariff and nontariff barriers in de-
veloping countries, these authors also call for other policy changes aimed
at eliminating large government deficits, curtailing inflationary monetary
policies, maintaining market-oriented exchange rates, increasing competi-
tion among domestic firms, reducing government corruption, improving
the educational system, strengthening the legal system, and so forth. As the
country studies have clearly demonstrated, not only are high tariff levels
usually associated with highly restrictive nontariff measures, export sub-
sidies to selected sectors, overvalued exchange rates, large government
deficits, extensive rent-seeking and corruption, unstable governments, and
so forth; but significant reductions in trade barriers are also accompanied
by important liberalization efforts in these nontrade policy areas. The ex-
tensive multicolinearity among the policy variables affecting these con-
ditions is the reason that researchers who undertake both cross-country
statistical analyses and individual country studies often try to combine
various policies into a single index of economic openness or use broad
openness measures such as price differences that clearly are affected by
much more than just trade policies affecting the individual commodities.
The general strategy followed by Rodriguez and Rodrik in critiquing the
various studies involves examining the individual components of the gen-
eral measures of openness used by the authors to find out if the tariff and
nontariff trade components in these measures are by themselves related to
economic growth in a statistically significant manner, determining if intro-
ducing plausible additional variables not directly related to trade policy
changes the significance levels of the trade variables, and exploring whether
modifying the econometric techniques followed in a seemingly reasonable
manner results in a loss of significance of the trade variables. As the sum-
mary of their findings presented in this paper show, they generally find that
tariffs and nontariff coverage either are not statistically significant by
themselves or lose their significance when other variables are added in the
regression equations or different econometric techniques are utilized.
It is quite true that those recommending changes in economic policies in
developing countries sometimes make statements implying that just lower-
ing trade barriers will raise growth rates, and we should be grateful to Ro-
driguez and Rodrik for pointing out that the available empirical evidence
does not support this claim. Of course, the quality of the existing data on
the restrictiveness of tariffs and nontariff trade barriers is so poor that
when better data become available we may find this relationship may in-
deed hold under certain circumstances. But it is a caricature of the posi-
tions of most economists in academia or in governmental institutions to

maintain that they fail to realize and recommend the necessity of policy
changes beyond just those covering trade to stimulate sustained increases
in growth rates. Especially since the Bhagwati and Krueger and Papageor-
giou, Michaely and Choksi country studies, economists have emphasized
the need, as a minimum, for a stable and nondiscriminatory exchange rate
system and the need for prudent monetary and fiscal policies and corrup-
tion-free administration of economic policies for trade liberalization to be
effective in the long run.
The evidence that a general policy position of openness is preferable to
long-run economic growth than an inward-looking policy stance should
not be interpreted, however, as implying that no government interventions,
such as selective production subsidies or controls on short-term capital
movements, are appropriate at certain stages of development. We know
from the individual country studies that policymakers in some economies,
such as South Korea, in shifting from policies favoring import-substitution
policies to an outward-oriented policy approach actively intervened to
promote exports. Some authors maintain that they succeeded in spite of
these interventionist activities due to the predominance of liberalizing
policies, but it may be that some of these government actions actually
helped to raise growth rates. In my view, the individual country and cross-
country studies support the conclusion that, on balance, general economic
openness is much more favorable to growth than a general inward-looking
economic approach but that some policies regarded as causing static eco-
nomic distortions may be appropriate at certain times and under various
circumstances. As Rodrik (2002) argues in an introductory essay to a series
of country studies he has organized, we urgently need more studies that try
give guidance on just what these times and circumstances are. One type of
study that should be undertaken more extensively is the careful monitor-
ing of the direct and indirect effects of liberalization measures from the
outset of their introduction.
The statistical finding that increases in exports and increased growth are
generally positively related in a significant statistical sense also involves the
problem of causation. The export increase may be result of trade policy
changes, other nontrade policy actions, or forces unrelated to a govern-
ment’s policy actions. As noted earlier, the export increase also may be the
consequence of economic growth rather than the cause. Furthermore, the
use of exports as an openness measure has the drawback of being a com-
ponent of GDP, the usual measure of economic growth.
Consequently, as Rodriguez and Rodrik argue, not only does the search
for the relationship between trade barriers and growth seem futile, but it
does not even seem to make much sense to investigate what the empirical
evidence is on this relationship in view of the complex interrelationships
between trade policy and other government policies and various macro-
economic variables when one is talking about trade policy actions covering
a wide group of goods (e.g., manufactures) rather than a particular indus-
try. Actually, most of the country studies, particularly the later ones, have
been concerned with government policies that cover much more than nar-
rowly defined trade barriers to international trade.
It is true that developing countries are often given the policy advice that
decreasing trade barriers is a more effective way of achieving higher sus-
tainable rates of growth than tightening trade restrictions. But those giving
such advice also emphasize the need, as a minimum, for a stable and
nondiscriminatory exchange rate system and usually also the need for pru-
dent monetary and fiscal policies and corruption-free administration of
economic policies for trade liberalization to be effective in the long run. It
seems to me that the various country studies do support this type of policy
advice and that the cross-country statistical studies do not overturn this
conclusion. But the recent critiques of these latter studies demonstrate that
we must be careful in attributing any single economic policy, such as the
lowering of trade barriers, as being a sufficient government action for ac-
celerating the rate of economic growth.
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Comment Simon Commander
The paper provides an elegant and insightful tour d’horizon of the main
findings of the substantial literature concerned with the relationship be-
tween openness and growth.
It takes a critical look at the swings in the intellectual pendulum that first
emphasized infant-industry arguments and then gave preference to more
open regimes. Throughout, the paper rightly emphasizes the importance
of placing trade policy in the context of other policies, including macro-
economic policy and the business environment more generally.
Trade barriers are—at the least—likely to distort resource allocation by
shifting relative prices; at the worst, they lead to lower or unsustainable
growth. In endogenous growth models, growth should be raised by lower
barriers to trade. The size of effect will presumably depend on technology
externalities, investment, and learning effects. The elements of the virtuous
circle are not broadly in question, although their empirical identifica-
tion—as the paper indicates—remains more problematic. However, it is
quite possible that, depending on initial factor endowments and technol-
ogy, some countries may have lower growth with lower trade barriers. As
Baldwin acknowledges, there may be cases where greater openness can im-
pede growth—say, through initial lack of technological development re-
sulting in specializations that lower growth—but these are ultimately vari-
ations around the infant-industry argument.
Over the past twenty years trade opening has, at least in principle, been
a central part of the policy talk and, sometimes, conditionality of multi-
lateral lenders—such as the World Bank—when dealing with developing
countries (although how hard such conditions have been enforced is an-
other matter). More than a few claims for the positive impact of such mea-
sures on performance have been made, whether using cross-country anal-
Simon Commander is director of the Centre for New and Emerging Markets (CNEM) at
the London Business School and adviser in the Office of Chief Economist at the European
Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).
ysis or case studies. Yet the results, particularly from the former, have been
curiously unsatisfying.
In common with some other recent and skeptical research—principally
Rodriguez and Rodrik (2000) and Srinivasan and Bhagwati (2001)—this
paper suggests that we can expect relatively small returns to further inquiry
into this relationship from cross-country regressions. It suggests that coun-
try-level studies may yield more robust conclusions. It would be helpful to
understand quite how that would be the case; what sort of empirical strate-
gies could usefully be employed, and how to avoid the standard problem of
local detail defying generalization. In this regard, it would surely make
sense for focus to be placed on specific episodes of protectionism or liber-
alization and to try and understand better their consequences.
A significant part of the paper is largely a critique of one particular re-
search strategy—cross-country analysis—and the robustness of its find-
ings. Indeed, it is striking that even some of its most devoted practitioners
now acknowledge the relatively meager harvest. Thus, Easterly and Levine
(2001), in reviewing more than a decade of empirical work on growth, re-
cently concluded that the residual rather than factor accumulation ac-
counts for most differences in growth across countries but that total factor
productivity is still largely a black box. National policies—including the
trade regime—do affect growth, but to what extent is unclear, as is the ex-
tent to which any positive effect is contingent on consistency with other
policies. However, despite the ambiguity of the cross-country empirical re-
sults, the fact remains that countries with significant and sustained trade
barriers have performed relatively poorly.
Why, then, has this literature found this central empirical relationship to
be such a bar of soap? This is clearly partly a question of measurement and
the quality of data; partly a problem of chronic endogeneity; partly a prob-
lem of omitted variables bias; and partly a problem of the inability to dis-
entangle adequately the effect of other—and possibly enabling—policies.
Certainly, the data sets used in these cross-country regressions have diffi-
culty in picking up marginal changes in trade regimes, while large-order
reforms may simply reflect a response to a wider pathology of problems.
Moreover, there are likely to be major problems in identifying the precise
weight of trade policies when other significant reforms are being imple-
mented more-or-less contemporaneously. Indeed, perhaps the strongest
result that flows from this literature is that the use of trade restrictions
(whatever their precise form) tends to be part of a broader pathology of
policies that generally limits growth. Fiscal imbalances, multiple exchange
rates with black-market premia, and other domestic controls have mostly
been observed alongside trade barriers. The causation may be complex,
however.
Any robust association between openness and performance appears to
be contingent on a number of factors, including country, region, and other
attributes. Rodrik (2002) has argued that trade plays a secondary role com-
pared to deeper factors, such as institutions and geography. Obviously,
these relationships are not one-way—good institutions generate trade,
openness yields better institutions, and so on. However, causality is again
difficult to sort out, particularly in cross-country work, not least because
of difficulties in measuring institutional performance, let alone the time
frame in which changes in institutional performance occur.
The difficulties in pinning down these relationships can be understood
from an interesting example. Suppose that openness is also associated with
more volatility or income risk—a proposition advanced, inter alia, by Ro-
drik (1998). (Quite why this should necessarily be the case needs more sub-
stantiation). Governments may choose to reduce that volatility through
spending programs. Indeed, the argument has been that the growth of
transfer programs (or the welfare state) post-1945 in Western Europe was
primarily with the objective of lowering citizens’ exposure to risk and
was—in a political economy sense—a necessary condition for sustaining
trade opening. As such, the causality was from openness to government
size. However, if we believe Barro and Sala-i-Martin (1995) and others’
findings, government size would in due course negatively affect growth.
Thus, any positive effect of openness on growth would, to some extent, be
offset by this negative effect from size to growth.
How robust has been the hypothesized (positive) association between
openness and government size and the (negative) association between gov-
ernment size and growth? Using pooled data with ten-year averages for
over 130 countries for the period from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s, it
transpires that evidence for government stabilizing through consumption
holds only for low-income countries.1 The finding is not robust for either
high- or middle-income countries. Further, the low-income finding could
be interpreted in terms of inertia or persistence rather than as the conse-
quence of an active policy of risk mitigation. The negative association be-
tween government size to growth seems robust when specifying size in
terms of government consumption. However, this is a far from complete
measure of government (commonly excluding off-budget items and/or cov-
erage of public enterprises), and if size responds to openness through re-
distribution (transfers) it would not necessarily capture what we are after.
Again, it would seem that work with large cross-country data sets yields
ambiguous, if not misleading, results.
That the empirical relationship between openness and performance has
not stood up particularly well when using large numbers of pooled obser-
vations or countries seems clear. Does this type of approach fare better
with smaller samples with, say, more common initial conditions?
1. Whether using the standard deviation in the terms of trade as the measure of income
volatility or simply the change in the terms of trade, see Commander, Davoodi, and Lee (1997).
The obvious experiment here is the transition countries. All started with
common ownership and control regimes, administered prices and trade or-
ganized on the basis of Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA)
prescription. These partly mimicked some view of comparative advantage,
but with a binding restriction that trade had to be conducted intra-CMEA.
Over ten years ago, these barriers came tumbling down, albeit with differ-
ent degrees of liberalization across country and region. Growth has since
varied widely across countries and regions.
How do trade variables fare in explaining comparative performance?
“Not very well” seems to be the answer. As usual, these models are sensi-
tive to specification error through omitted variables, high multicollinearity
between exogenous variables, and so on. Further, the scale of reform and
structural change has meant that it is very difficult to unpick the relative
contributions of specific policies to growth; everything is pretty much jum-
bled up with everything else. Moreover, while most countries—barring the
obvious laggards (Uzbekhistan, Belarus, Turkmenistan)—generally have
low barriers to trade (import tariffs ranging between 5 and 10 percent),
nontrivial other restrictions on trade have commonly been imposed on
particular products and sectors generally in response to lobbying by vested
interests, while licensing and other restrictions further hold back trade. In
short, trade policy on the ground remains quite discretionary. These sorts
of things necessarily evade the trade measures often used in cross-country
work.
However, there appears to be a strong and positive association between
export market growth and growth,2 and this seems to be closely linked to
large-order trade reorientation toward the European Union. Aside from
trade in natural resources (a large part of the Russian story), export growth
has in turn been associated with prior product upgrading and investment,
commonly by foreigners, itself the product of greater openness. By con-
trast, trade and other investment barriers (e.g., high bribe taxes and the
like) limit restructuring, investment (including by foreigners), and quality
upgrading. In turn, productivity improvements remain small or absent, as
do export opportunities. Clearly, any solutions must necessarily embrace a
great deal more than trade policy.
Finally, the transition experience highlights not so much the infant-
industry issue, but the problem of declining sectors and whether trade pol-
icy can be sensibly used to cushion or smooth restructuring costs—a fac-
tor of considerable relevance when job destruction is likely to be large. The
welfare costs associated with using trade policy rather than targeted bud-
getary subsidies would, of course, be larger. The evidence suggests that
protection has not been a general policy response for declining sectors.
2. Export market growth being adjusted for the share of exports in GDP; see Christoffer-
son and Doyle (1998).
In short, any review of the growth and openness literature demonstrates

that more open trade regimes go hand in hand with good investment cli-
mates and other virtuous features, and vice versa. But—as Baldwin’s paper
confirms—measuring the impact of trade policy and/or openness on
growth using cross-country regressions has generally proven a rather un-
rewarding, and occasionally misleading, exercise. The challenge is to work
out at what level of disaggregation such inquiry can best proceed.
References
Barro, R. J., and X. Sala-i-Martin. 1995. Economic growth. New York: McGraw-
Hill.
Christofferson, P., and P. Doyle. 1998. From inflation to growth: Eight years of
transition. Economics of Transition 8 (2): 421–51.
Commander, S., H. Davoodi, and U. Lee. 1997. The consequences of government
for growth and well-being. World Bank Working Papers on Governance, Corrup-
tion, Legal Reform 1785 (June). Washington, D.C.: World Bank.
Easterly, W., and R. Levine. 2001. It’s not factor accumulation: Stylised facts and
growth models. World Bank Economic Review 15 (2): 177–219.
Rodriguez, F., and D. Rodrik. 2000. Trade policy and economic growth: A sceptic’s
guide to the cross-national evidence. In Macroeconomics annual 2000, ed. Ben
Bernanke and Kenneth S. Rogoff. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rodrik, D. 1998. Why do more open economies have bigger governments? Journal
of Political Economy 106 (5): 997–1032.
———. 2002. Institutions, integration, and geography: In search of the deep de-
terminants of economic growth. Paper presented for Analytic Country Studies
on Growth, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard.
Srinivasan, T. N., and J. Bhagwati. 2001. Outward orientation and development:
Are revisionists right? In Trade, development, and political economy, ed. D. Lal
and R. Snape, 3–26. London: Palgrave.

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This PDF is a selection from a published volume from the

National Bureau of Economic Research

Volume Title: Challenges to Globalization: Analyzing the

Volume Author/Editor: Robert E. Baldwin and L. Alan Winters,

Volume Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Volume ISBN: 0-262-03615-4

Volume URL: http://www.nber.org/books/bald04-1

Conference Date: May 24-25, 2002

Publication Date: February 2004

Title: Openness and Growth: What’s the Empirical Relationship?

Author: Robert E. Baldwin

Robert E. Baldwin is Hilldale Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the University of Wis-

cover such matters as exchange-rate policies, domestic taxes and subsidies,

authors contend that, in fact, because of various methodological short-

13.2 The Widespread Acceptance of Import-Substitution Policies

in their predictions that such an approach would be successful in raising

2. Also see Krueger (1997).

13.3 The Shift to Outward-Oriented Policies

This change in conventional thinking by economists and policymakers

changes in levels of import protection and export subsidization but the

tistical analyses of inward-looking versus outward-looking policies indi-

13.4 Openness and the New Growth Theory

only to one-time changes in levels of production, although in the real world

13.5 More Sophisticated Cross-Country Studies,

to underlying trade liberalizing policies that countries have undertaken”

ness to growth, the main operational implication is that governments

tions of most economists in academia or in governmental institutions to

Comment Simon Commander

In short, any review of the growth and openness literature demonstrates

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