While the technical academic debate continues, Frankel and Rose (2002) have shown that openness does indeed play a role even after allowing for geography and its possible indirect effects, while Wacziarg and Welch (2008) demonstrate that even if the cross-country evidence was not robust over the 199os, if one takes countries' histories individually, the dates of trade liberalization do characterize breaks in investment and GDP growth rates. Specifically, for the i95o-98 period, they find that countries that liberalized their trade (raising their trade-to-GDP ratio by an average of 5 percentage
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