<p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><h1>Abstract</h1><h2>C-Level Paper in Political Science, by David Olsson, Autumn 2008. Supervisor: Malin Stegman McCallion. “Regime Type and Trade Policy: Has Increased Democratization Contributed to Lower Trade Barriers Among Autocratic States?”</h2><p> </p><p>In this paper a new two-level game theory, based on previous research and deductive reasoning, is constructed and tested empirically. The purpose is to examine if developing new democracies, trading with developing autocracies, is an explanatory factor of trade liberalization among the latter. The research questions are: 1) Have tariff rates in developing autocratic countries followed the pattern of reduced tariffs among their developing new democratic trading partners? And; 2) If this is the case, is there a relative shift in trade flows that confirms this change to be an effect of the new democracies’ presumed influence?</p><p> In order to sufficiently carry out an empirical scrutiny, seven other determinants found to have effects on trade policies in previous research, are accounted for using a “most similar systems design”. For reasons of delimitation, six autocracies and their fifteen most important trading partners, observed 1980-1999, have been paired and analyzed. Each pair consists of one autocracy that trades with new democracies and one that does not; regarding the other determinants they are as similar as possible. The used material is the World Development Indicators, the Polity IV Dataset, the Yearbook of International Trade Statistics, the World Economic Outlook Database, the Database of Political Institutions, statistics from the World Trade Organization, the Dataset of Armed Conflicts, and the Unweighted Average Tariffs Measurement. </p><p> The conclusion is that there are no indicators that affirm the theory and research questions. However, the theory is not unambiguously falsified. Hence, studies on more countries and time spans are needed. </p><p> </p><p> </p></p><p> </p><p><p> </p></p><p> </p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA/oai:DiVA.org:kau-3407 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Olsson, David |
| Publisher | Karlstad University, Faculty of Social and Life Sciences |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, text |
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