Pacifying the Rebels? Foreign Trade and Domestic Protests in LDCs

• In Event: Poster Session: International Political Economy I

Abstract

Political scientists have long been interested in examining how international trade, an important aspect of economic globalization, affects the domestic conflict. The conventional wisdom based on factor endowment theory concurs that unskilled workers are economically beneficial and would less likely to protest against the governments of less-developed countries. Such co-optation thesis, however, might not hold in less-developed countries whereby unskilled workers turn out experiencing the increase of economic risks when the economy is more exposed to the global market. This paper proposes that the skill-premium effect caused by foreign trade also matters in less-developed countries, whereby leads to the rise of domestic protests. By using value-added trade measurement other than the total trade this paper finds that the so-called “globalization winners"-the unskilled workers in less-developed countries would be more likely to protest against the governments as the country is more liberalized. This study provides new insights into how trade affects regime stability among less-developed countries. Empirically, this paper also begs the scholars of trade to take the measurements of trade in the era of global supply chain seriously.

Author

• Li Zheng, The University of Houston