Democratic Convergence and Free Trade
TLDR
The authors showed that if trade is based on relative comparative advantages, and countries specialize on the basis of factor endowments, democratic convergence (or any type of regime convergence for that matter) empowers as many free traders as protectionists, with negative consequences for trade; only if trade was fueled by scale economies, and country specialize along product lines, then may political convergence not hurt trade.Abstract:
Even if a democracy were more likely to pursue free trade than an autocracy (an unproven generalization), the simultaneous spread of democracy in the world would not necessarily yield a reduction in protection, but might in fact cause an increase. The reason for this paradoxical outcome is the fact that democratic convergence creates power profiles identical across nations. Similar regimes tend to empower the same classes of producers, with the result that if trade is based on relative comparative advantages, and countries specialize on the basis of factor endowments, democratic convergence (or any type of regime convergence for that matter) empowers as many free traders as protectionists, with negative consequences for trade; only if trade is fueled by scale economies, and countries specialize along product lines, then may political convergence not hurt trade. Empirically, I show that this model helps explain the timing of nineteenth-century European trade liberalization better than existing explanations; it also helps us understand the easiness with which liberalization proceeded in the postwar era; and it casts a new light on the difficulties presently encountered, with democracy spreading at a time when product specialization is on the retreat.read more
Citations
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Why Democracies Cooperate More: Electoral Control and International Trade Agreements
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyze the domestic political conditions under which states have concluded such agreements and, more generally, explore the factors affecting interstate economic cooperation, finding that democratic countries are about twice as likely to form a preferential trading agreement as autocratic countries.
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Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays
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The political economy of international trade
TL;DR: For instance, the authors argues that large-scale changes in political institutions, especially in the direction of democracy, may be necessary for the kind of massive trade liberalization that has occurred.
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Democratic Trading Partners: The Liberal Connection, 1962–1989
Harry Bliss,Bruce Russett +1 more
TL;DR: This article found that shared democratic polity, common language, and openness to trade are associated with higher values of international trade, and they also found that common language and common regime type correlated with higher trade.
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Commercial Imperialism? Political Influence and Trade during the Cold War
TL;DR: For example, Findlay and O'Rourke as discussed by the authors found evidence that increased political influence arising from CIA interventions during the Cold War was used to create a larger foreign market for American products.
References
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Book
The Making of the English Working Class
TL;DR: Fifty years since first publication, E P Thompson's revolutionary account of working-class culture and ideals is published in Penguin Modern Classics, with a new introduction by historian Michael Kenny as discussed by the authors.
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Increasing returns, monopolistic competition, and international trade
TL;DR: The authors developed a simple, general equilibrium model of non-comparative advantage trade and showed that trade and gains from trade will occur, even between countries with identical tastes, technology, and factor endowments.
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International regimes, transactions, and change: embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the prevailing view of international economic regimes is strictly positivistic in its epistemological orientation and stresses the distribution of material power capabilities in its explanatory logic.
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TL;DR: The nature of international political change is discussed in this paper, where the authors present a change and continuity index for the contemporary world Bibliography Index of political change and change in world politics.