Innovation: Another Benefit of Trade

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With many still worrying about the policy outcomes of Trump’s protectionist rhetoric, here’s yet another study demonstrating the importance of trade liberalization. From the abstract:

This paper estimates the effect of trade policy during the Great Liberalization of the 1990s on innovation in over 60 countries using international firm-level patent data. The empirical strategy exploits ex-ante differences in firms’ exposure to countries and industries, allowing us to construct firm-specific measures of tariffs. This provides a source of variation that enables us to establish the causal impact of trade policy on innovation. Our results suggest that trade liberalization has economically significant effects on innovation and, ultimately, on technical change and growth. According to our estimates, about 7 percent of the increase in knowledge creation during the 1990s can be explained by trade policy reforms. Furthermore, we find that the increase in patenting reflects innovation, rather than simply more protection of existing knowledge. Both improved market access and more import competition contribute to the positive innovation response to trade liberalization.

The “Great Enrichment” that has taken place over the last two centuries is due to what economist Deirdre McCloskey refers to as “market-tested innovation and supply (or market-tested improvement). If we are interested in the continual enrichment and betterment of the world, we should be fully supportive of international trade.

The entire paper can be read here.