Corruption and the Level of Trade Protectionism

In this paper, impacts of corruption on the level of trade protectionism, trade openness, and imports are analyzed. It is argued that special interest groups who are lobbying with corrupted governments might seek more benefits in some special subgroups of imports. Possible country and time specific fixed effects, endogeneity and some other problems in the regressions are controlled to achieve results that are more robust. Corruption measures from two different sources of Worldwide Governance Indicator and Transparency International website are analyzed in two separate similar approaches. It is finally concluded that both measures of corruption implicate negative influence on only one import subgroup, while there is no significant impact on protectionism measures.