TRADE POLICY OPENNESS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OUTCOMES: A QUANTILE REGRESSION ANALYSIS

Анотація

Purpose.This study examines the heterogeneous effects of trade policy openness on sustainable development outcomes across the conditional distribution of country performance.While existing literature has established a positive aggregate relationship between globalisation and development, limited attention has been paid to the distributional heterogeneity of trade regulatory frameworks' effects on specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly those most directly linked to trade and customs regulation: SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure), and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals).Methods.The study employs panel quantile regression on a dataset covering 167 countries over the period 2001-2023.Trade policy openness is operationalised through the KOF Trade Globalisation de jure index, which captures customs duties, trade taxes, regulatory trade barriers, and trade agreement coverage.The de facto trade globalisation index is included simultaneously to disentangle policy architecture effects from actual trade flows.Controls include governance quality (Worldwide Governance Indicators), GDP per capita, and population size.All independent variables are lagged by one year to mitigate reverse causality.Results.The findings reveal three distinct patterns.For SDG 9, trade policy openness exerts a strong, positive, and remarkably uniform effect across all quantiles (coefficients ranging from 0.089 to 0.115), while de facto trade flows show no independent effect.This suggests that the regulatory architecture of trade, including customs facilitation and barrier reduction, is the primary channel through which trade engagement advances industrial and innovative capacity.For SDG 8, the effect is asymmetric: trade policy openness significantly benefits countries at the top of the performance distribution (Q90: 0.050) but not at the median.For SDG 17, a non-monotonic pattern emerges, with negative effects at lower quantiles and positive effects at upper quantiles.Conclusions.The results demonstrate that trade policy frameworks, rather than actual trade volumes, constitute the primary mechanism linking international economic engagement to progress in sustainable development.The findings have direct implications for customs administrations: streamlining trade regulatory environments and deepening trade agreements can yield measurable gains in industrial development outcomes, particularly for lower-income economies, where the marginal effect of policy openness is largest.

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