Correction to “The Political Determinants of International Trade”

Extract

Efforts to replicate our study of the effects of politics on trade flows between the major powers have revealed that the computer program written to calculate the estimates produced errors in both the coefficients and the standard errors. Furthermore, these errors have some consequences for the results. In this brief corrigendum, we present corrected tables for our research note and a slightly modified interpretation of the results.

Our study examined evidence to assess three arguments about how politics may affect trade. The first contends that positive political relations in a dyad result in higher levels of trade. This argument leads to two hypotheses: States in conflict will have a lower level of trade than those not in conflict, and trade will increase with the degree of common interests between a pair of states. The second argument concludes that democratic dyads will have a higher level of trade than other dyads. The third argument focuses on the security concerns of states and leads to the hypotheses that alliances will increase trade in a bipolar system but will have no effect in a multipolar system. We refer readers to the original article for a fuller statement of the logic of these arguments, their respective hypotheses, and a complete statement of our research design and operationalization of the variables (Morrow, Siverson, and Tabares 1998).