Long-run dynamics between trade liberalization and income inequality in the European Union: a second generation approach

Abstract

The surprisingly limited literature investigating whether there exists a long-run association between trade liberalization and income inequality finds strong evidence for it. We point out a possible model misspecification due to ignoring the presence of cross-section dependence. Using a panel of 15 EU countries in the 1985–2017 period we show that there is strong evidence for the presence of cross-section dependence. Therefore, we use so-called second-generation procedures (which are robust to cross-section dependence) and find no evidence that trade liberalization and income inequality share a long-run cointegrating relationship in the European Union. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.