Does globalization influence protectionism? Empirical evidence from agricultural support

There are several motivations for domestic policy-makers to protect food markets in the course of globalization. On the other hand, there are also theoretical arguments for why globalization should lead to less assistance to domestic farmers. By using a large cross-country data set and a dynamic panel data analysis, I investigate the influence of globalization on protectionist policies in the agricultural sector empirically. I find that globalization induces countries to increase agricultural protection. This result is robust to dealing with the potential endogeneity of globalization via internal instruments generated by the system GMM model.