Passport, please! Travels, travails and trade

ABSTRACT

A country’s visa policies are widely assumed to have economic consequences. In this short paper, I examine the effect of the ease with which a country’s citizens can enter foreign countries on international trade. Using a specification of the gravity model that avoids the endogeneity problems that typically arise when analyzing the association between ease of travel and the extent of bilateral interactions, I find that countries which issue powerful passports experience more international trade.

KEYWORDS:

• Visa
• document
• mobility
• border
• barrier

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• F14
• F59
• F29

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Bangwayo-Skeete and Skeete (2017) take a different perspective. Aiming to identify determinants of a country’s visa policies, they find, for instance, that membership in the European Union is associated with more visa-free travel privileges.

² See https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about.html.

³ See https://www.passportindex.org.