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LIT-1416: International Friends and Enemies

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Properties5
StatusActive — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1403) in full, from NBER's copy of the working paper as revised in March 2023; worth reading as a measure of economic dependence that is not bilateral trade, the general-equilibrium elasticity of one country's real income to another's productivity, and as a causal estimate, from two instruments, that it moves UN voting, strategic rivalry and alliances. Read it knowing that the effect in the pair panel is 0.094 SD per SD of exposure, that the China evidence is one cross-section of 119 countries, that the air-travel exclusion restriction is argued and not tested, that ideological rivalry does not respond, and that the paper's own model of alignment is strategic. The journal version of 2024 was not seen.
Version2
Tagssociety-and-governance, social-science, network-science
ReportsCASE-150 — Economic alignment and political alignment: Kleinman, Liu and Redding find, using China's integration into the world economy and falling air-transport costs as sources of variation, that countries whose welfare becomes more dependent on each other's productivity become more politically aligned
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1403 — Kleinman, Liu and Redding — International friends and enemies

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Kleinman, B., Liu, E. and Redding, S. J. (2024). International friends and enemies. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 16(4), 350–385. doi:10.1257/mac.20220223. First issued as NBER Working Paper 27587, July 2020, doi:10.3386/w27587.

Read in full on 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1403), from the NBER working paper as revised in March 2023. The outcomes the flag below leaves unchecked are confirmed: UN voting and strategic rivalries, and formal alliances.

Why this is here

The exchange carried the favour from persons to states: trade as a standing exchange that comes before, and then shapes, political alignment. It cited this paper for economic alignment causing political alignment (UN voting, rivalries), with quasi-experimental variation from China’s integration and air-transport costs. The abstract agrees on the direction, the causal claim and both sources of variation. Flag: the abstract names no outcome measure; “UN voting” and “rivalries” are not in it and are unchecked. Bears on CLAIM-404 (an organization governed from outside through what its procedures receive) and CLAIM-275.

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