0000000000555467
AUTHOR
Christian Martin
Public Spending and Trade Liberalization: The Compensation Hypothesis Revisited
Despite a widespread fascination with the so called compensation hypothesis – i.e. the proposition that governments have to provide insurance against the risks of open markets to make integration into the international economy politically feasible – there appears to exist a complete lack of research where a rather straightforward implication of this theoretical mechanism is concerned, namely that liberalization of the trade regime should become more likely with a larger public sector and more social spending already in place. In this paper, we test this hypothesis that can be regard as a complement to existing research on the compensation hypothesis. We draw on a theoretical model that link…
How Electoral Institutions Change the Influence of World Trade Integration on Trade Policies
World integration levels influence opportunity costs of maintaining restrictive national trade policies. In an integrated world, restrictive trade policies are more costly than in a context of low overall levels of world market integration. We argue that policy makers can be expected to react to these varying incentives to liberalize the trade regimes of their countries, yet do so not in a uniform fashion across countries. Rather, the responsiveness to changes in levels of world trade integration is conditional upon the electoral system the country in question employs. This is due to the fact that opportunity cost considerations increase in importance with a) the degree to which policy make…