The effects of bilateral attitudes on imports

Xiaohua BAO, Qing LIU, Larry D. QIU*, Daming ZHU

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Journal PublicationsJournal Article (refereed)peer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Research based on the gravity model has shown that non‐economic factors affect international trade, and recent studies have shown that people's perception affects economic exchange. In this study, we explore the effects of attitudes on bilateral trade. Using survey data from the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Projects for 68 countries from 2002 to 2015 we find that a more favorable attitude of a country toward another country will increase the former country's imports from the latter. The result is robust to endogeneity check, to different measures of attitudes, and to different estimation methods. However, heterogeneity is observed across different types of goods and countries. The result holds for trade in intermediate and consumer goods, but the effects are not statistically significant for capital goods. The effects are statistically significant for bilateral trade between different country groups, except for high‐income countries' imports from non‐high‐income countries.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)371-387
Number of pages17
JournalThe World Economy
Volume43
Issue number2
Early online date13 Sept 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Feb 2020

Bibliographical note

We benefited from presentations in the International Trade Workshop in UIBE (Beijing), SHUFE (Shanghai), Shanghai Lixin University of Accounting and Finance, and comments and suggestions from Andrew Bernard, Yuxin Chen and Faqin Lin.

Keywords

  • attitude
  • trade

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