Opening markets, one threat at a time: how US pressure shapes global trade

Since the 1980s, the United States has unilaterally pressured many developing countries to open their markets to American exports. Despite such pressure coinciding with trade liberalization around the world, prior research largely concludes that US pressure was ineffective. This paper challenges this conventional wisdom by mitigating selection bias in previous studies, which focused on late-stage forms of pressure such as Section 301 investigations and sanctions. In contrast, this paper estimates the effect of US pressure starting at an earlier stage: inclusion in the US’ National Trade Estimate (NTE) Report. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design with data on 157 developing countries from 1980 through 2020, we find that US pressure significantly increased imports from the US, with targeted countries increasing imports by 26.6% more than non-targeted countries after five years. We also find evidence that US pressure is especially effective on countries with high levels of trade dependence on the US. We supplement these quantitative results with qualitative evidence from US efforts to open cigarette markets abroad, demonstrating the effectiveness of US pressure associated with the NTE. The research provides important insights for understanding the exploitation of power asymmetries to enact policy change, an increasingly prominent feature of the contemporary global political economy.