Trade and Markets

Everyone's talking about this Pew report's demonstration of an inverse correlation between national wealth and national religiosity, complete with a big-time outlier for the USA, but I'm more interested in their findings on globalization. Specifically, check out this chart I made using their data just from rich countries on public attitudes toward "trade" and toward "free markets." Basically, there's no correlation here at all, which is pretty contrary to the tenor of public debate wherein trade skeptics tend to be skeptics about the virtues of the market more generally.

In public opinion, though, the main trend seems to be that smaller countries are more enthusiastic about trade -- presumably because people can see the downsides to reduced trade more clearly in places with smaller internal markets and more classes of goods that would be totally unavailable absent imports.

Comments

This would have worked better as a scatterplot. Edward Tufte would disapprove. The ink-to-information ratio is off the charts.

Posted by anon | October 25, 2007 9:54 AM

Exporting is also a big deal to smaller countries, many of whom are quite upset about the dollar's ongoing slide because it means the producers of exported goods get less of their home currency in exchange for them.

Posted by neil | October 25, 2007 9:57 AM

Net exporters like trade, Germany being a big exporter. Net importers like the US, who see manufacturing jobs moving abroad, maybe not so much.

Posted by Dave S. | October 25, 2007 11:01 AM

you shouldn't use a word like "correlation" in this circumstance. eyeballing data in graphs is a tool of the devil. you didn't test for correlation (it's not hard in excel), nor did you demonstrate a relationship between national "size" and a preference for trade. a proxy, like GDP or population would work well in a simple regression. let's step it up here -- if lefty bloggers want to claim their "reality-based" then they should deal with data appropriately.

Posted by David | October 25, 2007 11:17 AM

which is pretty contrary to the tenor of public debate wherein trade skeptics tend to be skeptics about the virtues of the market more generally.

It would be good for you to clarify who those trade skeptics are. Are you talking of fair traders?

Or some mythical creature that really wants to do away with all trade? Who are those people, how numerous are they, and what influence do they have?

Can you demonstrate anyone thinks the way you claim? trade skeptics tend to be skeptics about the virtues of the market more generally.

I don't believe fair traders have any skepticism whatsoever about the virtues of a free and fair market. I believe we're all for it.

Posted by Child Labor Is Not Good | October 25, 2007 12:18 PM

I'm extremely skeptical of any study that compares the broadly subjective term "religiosity" to wealth.

Religiosity means very different things depending on where you live and presumably what you believe is as important as how strongly you believe in it.

In fact, looking at the figure, it's dominated by regions (all of Africa is poor, all of Europe plots low on the religiosity scale - there doesn't seem to be any trend within either region).

It would have been slightly more illuminating to see the wealth of the individual United States versus religousity (instead of being a single "outlier").

Posted by Jinchi | October 25, 2007 1:28 PM

I don't believe fair traders have any skepticism whatsoever about the virtues of a free and fair market. I believe we're all for it.

You've got to be kidding. The "fair trade" movement is full of socialists, neo-socialists, and not a few commies.

Posted by Starving Children Is Even Worse | October 25, 2007 2:37 PM

Child,

What do you mean by fair? Does it involve making sure a given price is paid to producers, be it through production quotas, import quotas, import tariffs, subsidies, minimum prices or any such measures?

Posted by 1 | October 25, 2007 3:30 PM

These data do show a somewhat negative correlation (yes, I did a proper data analysis), but I would rather not see a truncated sample. All these attitudes are far into the positive range. I buy that among wealthy countries with a fairly positive attitude towards different versions of capitalist economic organization, there may be negative correlation based on the form of capitalism and the culture. However, if we compared across a wider range of countries I think we'd see a baseline positive correlation.

Posted by chas | October 26, 2007 11:33 AM