Scholarly Comments on Academic Economics

CIA Interventions, Tariff Changes, and Trade During the Cold War: A Variation and New Results

by

Read this article

Access statistics
3,669 article downloads
10,188 complete issue downloads
Total: 13,857

Abstract

An American Economic Review article by Daniel Berger, William Easterly, Nathan Nunn, and Shanker Satyanath (2013), “Commercial Imperialism? Political Influence and Trade During the Cold War,” finds a strong effect of the CIA interventions on imports of U.S. products. I test their results for robustness by using a different data set, and my estimates support most of the results reported by Berger and coauthors. However, my estimates indicate that the detected increase in imports from the U.S. also can be explained by changes in tariffs, which are not related to CIA interventions.

The appendix is available for download here.
Data and code used in this research is available for download here.

in

Download this article

Volume (Issue)
Pages
192–199
Published
JEL classification
F14, P16
Keywords
International trade, imports, political influence, Cold War, CIA interventions
Downloads
3,669 article downloads
10,188 complete issue downloads
Total: 13,857

Discuss this article!