This paper surveys measures of economic openness, the latter being understood as the degree to which non-domestic actors can or do participate in a domestic economy. Based on the existing literature, the authors introduce a typology of openness indicators, which distinguishes between ‘real’ and ‘financial’ openness as well as ‘de-facto’ and ‘de-jure’ measures of openness. They use data collected on these indicators to analyze trends in openness over time and to conduct a correlation analysis across indicators. Finally, they illustrate the potential consequences of employing different openness measures in a growth regression framework.
Gräbner, C., Heimberger, P., Kapeller, J. and Springholz, F. (2020): Understanding economic openness: a review of existing measures, Review of World Economics. DOI: 10.1007/s10290-020-00391-1
The research that has led to the compilation of the data set, the development of this homepage, and the publication of the accompanying paper has been funded by the Anniversary Fund of the Austrian Central Bank (Österreichische Nationalbank) under grant numbers 17383 and 18144.