17 Oct 2025
Recently, The research entitled “Are Nationalist Countries More Protectionist?” from Dr Gi Khan Ten from Department of Economics, International Business School Suzhou (IBSS) at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) has been published on World Development. The paper examines how consumer nationalism—buyers’ preference for domestic over foreign products—shapes governments’ ability to keep trade open. Contrary to the common view that nationalist markets always push protectionism higher, the study argues and tests that nationalism can, under realistic conditions, enable more cooperative (i.e., less protectionist) trade policies.
The authors build a theoretical two-country model in which firms sell differentiated products and set prices competitively, while governments set tariffs. Consumer nationalism is modeled as a demand shift: stronger home bias raises demand for domestic goods and lowers demand for imports. Cooperation is “self-enforcing”: each government compares the short-term gain from breaking a deal with the long-term loss from a trade war. The model predicts: (i) within a country pair, the country with relatively more nationalist consumers can sustain relatively more liberal trade policies; and (ii) how nationalism affects the most cooperative tariff depends on policymakers’ patience—impatient governments (more short-term oriented) can lower tariffs as nationalism rises; very patient ones can do the opposite.
For evidence, the paper links annual antidumping (AD) actions—a flexible and widely used form of contingent protection—to country-level measures of nationalism derived from international surveys (multiple indices), while accounting for other possible determinants of AD (e.g., economic growth, import growth, exchange rates, political ideology, and tariff overhangs). Across country pairs, the more nationalist market tends to use AD less than its partner, consistent with sustaining more liberal policies. Also, in relatively impatient countries, rising consumer nationalism is associated with fewer AD actions; in relatively patient countries, AD use can increase with nationalism. These patterns are qualitatively robust across various nationalism measures and econometric specifications.
In a nutshell, the paper delivers the following implications.
- Rising consumer nationalism does not uniformly translate into higher protection; in markets?where home bias already dampens import demand, governments may be able to sustain relatively liberal trade policies.
- Foreign producers operating in high-nationalism markets may face lower incremental tariff risk but stronger demand headwinds.
- The interaction between nationalism and policymakers’ time horizons implies differentiated risk: relatively impatient regimes may exhibit stable or easing protection when nationalism rises, whereas highly patient regimes may tilt toward more protectionist trade policies.
Andrey (Gi Khan Ten) joined the Department of Economics at IBSS in the spring term of 2024. His research focuses on development and labor economics, and his work has been published in World Development, Economic Modelling, Review of Development Economics, Journal of Asian Economics, and Development Policy Review. He earned his Ph.D. from the KDI School of Public Policy and Management.
World Development is a multidisciplinary monthly journal focused on development studies. Founded in 1973, it is published by Elsevier. Its theme areas cover multiple disciplines such as economics, politics, and sociology, with a key focus on development issues worldwide, such as poverty reduction, economic growth, and social justice. The journal is indexed in SCIE and SSCI databases. In the latest upgraded Partitioned table of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it is in the first zone of the major discipline of economics, with an impact factor of 5.4 in 2023. It provides a platform for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to exchange and share development research results, and is committed to promoting theoretical innovation and practical application in the field of development research.
17 Oct 2025