Speaker：Sung Eun Kim [Korea University]

Date：December 20, 2022／15:00‐16:40 (JST)

Location：Zoom

Language：English

Target:Open to University Members Only

Abstract：How do political conflicts shape economic relations? A series of empirical studies have shown that wars, militarized disputes, and diplomatic conflicts negatively affect trade relations between states. While it is widely accepted that trade tends to follow the flag, it remains relatively underexplored how and what types of political conflicts shape economic relations between states. To further explore this question, this talk introduces two empirical studies on political conflicts and trade relations. The first part will discuss how China uses regulatory barriers such as health and safety standards as a means of protectionism in response to political tensions with foreign countries. This study measures the degree of political tensions with a big data-based approach utilizing the GDELT (or Global Database of Events, Language and Tone) database. The second part will discuss a survey experiment that examines how public support for protectionist measures changes depending on who the target countries are. This study measures the effect of target country information by randomly switching the target of trade protectionist measures, and finds that public support for protectionism depends substantially on the target country (and potentially political relations with the target country).