A theory of trade policy under dictatorship and democratization

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in

Politics of trade protection in an autocracy: Evidence from an EU tariff liberalization in Morocco

“…The effect of political connectedness still turns out to be larger than any of these traditional drivers of endogenous protection. This paper contributes to the nascent literature on the politics of trade protection in authoritarian regimes (Galiani and Torrens (2014); Zissimos (2017)). 4 All authoritarian rulers face a perennial challenge of survival in the face of threats, including ones posed by elites.…”

“…While this approach is grounded in the problem of authoritarian control where the regime faces a threat from outside the elite, the same logic can be extended to the use of trade policy to reward elites. While Zissimos (2017) discusses the theoretical applicability of this framework to contexts in which trade policy can facilitate authoritarian power sharing, our paper offers the first systematic evidence on this account.…”

Institutional specialization

“…1 Bourguignon andVerdier (2000, 2005) study how trade openness and financial liberalization affect the incentives of a ruling elite to subsidize education for poorer workers. In Zissimos (2017), democracy induces trade liberalization only when the ruling elite owns a relatively scarce factor. In a similar vein, special-interest groups play a key role in Levchenko's (2013) analysis of the impact of international trade on institutional quality.…”

“…To put it differently, restrictions on trade might arise if the set of tax instruments were limited (see, for example,Zissimos, 2017). But inefficiencies due to power sharing are a more fundamental problem as they do not depend on any exogenous constraints on taxes and transfers.…”