Trade Costs in the First Wave of Globalization

What factors drove globalization in the late nineteenth century? We employ a new micro-founded measure of bilateral trade costs based on a standard model of trade in differentiated goods to address this question. These trade costs gauge the difference between observed bilateral trade and frictionless trade. They comprise tariffs, transportation costs, and all other factors that impede international trade but which are inherently difficult to observe. Trade costs fell on average by 10 to 16 percent between 1870 and 1913. We also use this measure to decompose the growth of trade over that period and find that roughly 44 percent of the rise in trade within our sample can be explained by reductions in trade costs; the remaining 56 percent is attributable to economic expansion.