Trade Liberalization, Economic Crises, and Growth

Many economic reforms are undertaken during an economic crisis, but is a crisis a good time to undertake trade reform? We investigate whether an economic crisis at the time of trade liberalization affects a country’s subsequent growth performance. We employ threshold regression techniques on five crisis indicators to identify the “crisis values” and to estimate the differential growth effects in the crisis and non-crisis regimes. Although trade liberalization in both crisis and non-crisis periods raises subsequent growth, we find that an internal crisis implies a lower acceleration and an external crisis a higher acceleration relative to the non-crisis regime.