Does Trade Foster Institutions? An Empirical Assessment

The relationship between trade and institutions has been extensively debated by trade economists and political scientists. The aim of the present paper is to provide some empirical evidence on the causal relationship between institutions and trade flows in a panel framework. We present a Granger causality test (1969) as well as a Hurlin and Venet (2001) test for panel data using a bilateral trade flows panel that covers 29 years. The issue of zero flows of trade is handled by using a panel Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood estimator.