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There has been a wide debate on whether democracy actually has an effect on economic outcomes, and especially on international trade. In reality, economies very active in the international trading network are not necessarily the most democratic countries. With a new estimation strategy, we analyze this relationship taking a look at the distribution of countries' trading activity. Using a panel quantile estimation framework, we find a stronger relationship at the lower quantiles, especially for the import activity. Our results suggest that the impact of democratization on trade is more important when countries trade less: the marginal benefit of democratization decreases as countries trade more. The results are robust to different institutional variables and even to instrumental variables estimation. Our results demonstrate that the effect of democracy on trade is underestimated using Ordinary Least Squares estimation for the group of countries for which the effect is statistically significant for, namely those countries that are active in the lower quantiles of the trading distribution.

There has been a wide debate on whether democracy actually has an effect on economic outcomes, and especially on international trade. With a new estimation strategy, we analyze this relationship taking a look at the distribution of countries´ trading activity. Using a panel quantile estimation framework from Powell (2014), we find a stronger relationship at the lower quantiles, especially for the import activity. Our results suggest that the impact of democratization on trade is more important when countries trade less: the marginal benefit of democratization decreases as countries trade more. This feature supports a widely neglected issue in the literature: economies very active in the international trading network are not necessarily the most democratic countries. The results are robust to different institutional variables and even to instrumental variables estimation. Our results demonstrate that the effect of democracy on trade is underestimated using Ordinary Least Squares estimation for the group of countries for which the effect is statistically significant for, namely those countries that are active in the lower quantiles of the trading distribution. Moreover, our results complement the findings by Barro (1996) which suggest that the effects of democracy for economic growth are not uniform for all countries.

RésuméLes auteurs s'interrogent sur le nombre des emplois qu'il conviendra de créer demain pour répondre aux besoins engendrés par l'évolution démographique, économique et technologique. Ils font le calcul pour la période 2020‐2030, en se fondant sur des projections de croissance démographique et de taux d'activité et en fixant des taux de chômage cibles. Les résultats sont ventilés par âge et par sexe. Les auteurs tiennent compte également de l'influence du niveau de revenu du pays et de l'automatisation. D'après leurs projections, les besoins de création d'emplois atteindront 340 millions en 2020‐2030, et ils seront imputables à l'évolution démographique bien plus qu'à l'automatisation.

ResumenSobre la base de estimaciones y proyecciones de 2010‐2020, se proyectan las necesidades mundiales de creación de empleo en 2020‐2030 teniendo en cuenta las previsiones de crecimiento demográfico y participación laboral, los objetivos en cuanto a control del desempleo y las tendencias en cuanto a automatización, por edad, por género y por grupos de países según su nivel de renta. Serán necesarios 340 millones de nuevos puestos en el próximo decenio según estas estimaciones, debido en mayor medida a la evolución demográfica que a la automatización.