The Contribution of Trade conditional on Human Capital, Financial Development and Institution to Economic Development. E

Master's Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Business economics - Economic Policy, grade: 1,3, , language: English, abstract: This thesis addresses the relationship between economic development and tradeopenness as well as some structural factors (i.e., human capital, financial resources andinstitution) in the ASEAN countries. This thesis has three objectives. First, it attempts toqualitatively describe the ASEAN cooperation in order to promote interest in ASEAN.Second, it quantitatively estimates the effect of international trade on economic developmentof the ASEAN nations. Finally, it investigates how the effect of international trade oneconomic growth varies as a result of differences in human capital, financial resources andinstitution across the ASEAN nations.To accomplish these tasks, panel dataset on the ASEAN nations from 1980 to 2010are collected and pooled OLS, fixed-effect and instrumental variable models are applied tothe dataset. Taking into account a variety ofspecification issues as well as endogeneity oftrade openness, the research results show that trade openness plays an extremely importantrole on economic development of these countries. In addition, the benefit from tradeopenness is greater in countries that have more educated workers, deeper financial resourcesand better quality of institution. In conclusion, this thesis suggests that these structural factorsneed to be strengthened in order to benefit more from international trade.Key words: International trade; human capital; financial development; institution; ASEAN;fixed effect; instrumental variable; policy reforms