Trade Policies and Economic Growth

To see the implication of trade policy in endogeneous growth model, we introduce trade protection that takes the form of an import tariff and represents one plus the rate of protection provided to industry sector. We showed that considering goodness of fit of regression model, we can see that the empirical evidence is strongly in favor of the character of trade policies as the instrument spurring economic growth. As for import tariff, we see that 1% increase in the rate of tariff that protect domestic market causes the rate of growth to increase by 0.87%. An import tariff to final product significantly spurs product development and faster growth come as a result. But, we should note that the effects of trade policy are muted by the induced changes in the output of intermediates in an economy that is relatively unproductive in the research lab.