Multilateral trade and export-led growth in the world economy: some post-war evidence

In this paper, we address an empirical question: is there evidence to substantiate the assumption that the post-war liberalization of world trade has actually led to a significant increase in the world GDP? In our attempt to answer that question, time series data in the Penn World Table 6.1 are aggregated across countries to obtain a measure of world trade and output, and the total number of GATT/WTO member countries is employed as an …