Distributional effects of globalization

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Γαβριελάτου, Ιωάννα

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The relationship between trade, growth and poverty is a controversial issue. Many economists argue that trade liberalization yields to positive economic effects. Instead, the validity of this view is more complex. In this dissertation we use poverty and trade data to estimate the distributional effects of globalization. We employ a dataset that includes the proportion of people that live on less than $1.9 a day, exports of agriculture, manufacturing and commodities sectors and GDP per capita growth. We conduct Pooled OLS and fixed effects estimations with time dummies. Given that the OLS estimates may provide biased estimations, due to the existence of country-specific effects, we further conduct Generalized Method of Moments estimations (GMM). Ultimately, poverty in the non low-income countries is expected to decrease in response to marginal changes in agricultural exports. Instead, we anticipate poverty responses to be positive in the low-income countries. Still, we find that the long-run responses are higher than the short-run responses and poverty rate in LIC is extremely sensitive to changes in agricultural exports, since the response exceeds unit. Marginal increases in manufactures exports yield to poverty reduction effects for the whole panel. We further infer that the response of poverty rate in LIC on marginal increases in commodities exports is positive. Instead, poverty rate is positively associated with GDP per capita growth in both short and long run.

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Agricultural exports, Economic growth, Income inequalities, Low income countries, Manufactures exports, Ores and Metals exports, Poverty

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