Do strong English skills boost international trade?
(2023) NEKH03 20222Department of Economics
- Abstract
- The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between English proficiency and trade. The question that this examination will try to answer is “do strong English skills boost international trade?”. That a common official language has a positive effect on bilateral trade flows have been confirmed by many. This paper will instead focus on English as a second language and will study whether countries with high levels of English skills trade more. The English language is spoken by millions of people globally and is widely accepted as a universal language. English has a special role as the working-language of many global companies as well as being taught as a subject in school from an early age all over the world. In this thesis, the... (More)
- The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between English proficiency and trade. The question that this examination will try to answer is “do strong English skills boost international trade?”. That a common official language has a positive effect on bilateral trade flows have been confirmed by many. This paper will instead focus on English as a second language and will study whether countries with high levels of English skills trade more. The English language is spoken by millions of people globally and is widely accepted as a universal language. English has a special role as the working-language of many global companies as well as being taught as a subject in school from an early age all over the world. In this thesis, the relationship between English proficiency and trade will be analyzed through the framework of the gravity model. The dataset used in this analysis takes the form of panel data consisting of 96 countries that bilaterally form into country-pairs. The time period used for the analysis consists of 4 years, starting at 2016 stretching to 2019. By doing an OLS-regression, the relationship between English proficiency and trade is captured by an English skill dummy variable. The English-data used comes from the Education First English proficiency index, the EF EPI in short. The general conclusion found from this examination is somewhat surprising. While English proficiency is shown to effect trade levels in some regressions, significance levels decrease when various fixed effects are included. Therefore, no statistically sound relationship can be proven. However, the results also indicate that English proficiency might proxy for some other important variable effecting levels of trade flow. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9109560
- author
- Falkland, Maria LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- NEKH03 20222
- year
- 2023
- type
- M2 - Bachelor Degree
- subject
- keywords
- The Gravity model, International economics, Language and trade, Bilateral trade, English as a global language.
- language
- English
- id
- 9109560
- date added to LUP
- 2023-06-07 10:48:31
- date last changed
- 2023-06-07 10:48:31
@misc{9109560,
abstract = {{The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between English proficiency and trade. The question that this examination will try to answer is “do strong English skills boost international trade?”. That a common official language has a positive effect on bilateral trade flows have been confirmed by many. This paper will instead focus on English as a second language and will study whether countries with high levels of English skills trade more. The English language is spoken by millions of people globally and is widely accepted as a universal language. English has a special role as the working-language of many global companies as well as being taught as a subject in school from an early age all over the world. In this thesis, the relationship between English proficiency and trade will be analyzed through the framework of the gravity model. The dataset used in this analysis takes the form of panel data consisting of 96 countries that bilaterally form into country-pairs. The time period used for the analysis consists of 4 years, starting at 2016 stretching to 2019. By doing an OLS-regression, the relationship between English proficiency and trade is captured by an English skill dummy variable. The English-data used comes from the Education First English proficiency index, the EF EPI in short. The general conclusion found from this examination is somewhat surprising. While English proficiency is shown to effect trade levels in some regressions, significance levels decrease when various fixed effects are included. Therefore, no statistically sound relationship can be proven. However, the results also indicate that English proficiency might proxy for some other important variable effecting levels of trade flow.}},
author = {{Falkland, Maria}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Do strong English skills boost international trade?}},
year = {{2023}},
}