Recent literature has analyzed three main channels regarding the effect of international trade on legal institutions: overall openness to trade, a specialization on institutionally intensive exports, and a dependence on exports of natural resources. Unlike previous literature, we examine all these channels within a single regression framework. Importantly, we develop a new measure of institutional intensity of exports at the goods level based on nearly one hundred million disaggregated bilateral trade flows. Our new measure shows that goods subject to international fragmentation of production are the most institutionally intensive. Using a sample of 144 countries, our regression results show that specialization on institutionally intensive exports, especially on fragmented goods, helps countries to improve their rule of law. In addition, we find that greater openness improves the rule of law, but we fail to find any effect from natural resources exports.

最近的文献分析了关于国际贸易对法律制度影响的三个主要渠道：贸易总体开放、制度密集型出口的专业化以及对自然资源出口的依赖。与以前的文献不同，我们在单个回归框架内检查所有这些通道。重要的是，我们基于近 1 亿分列的双边贸易流量，开发了一种新的商品出口制度强度衡量标准。我们的新措施表明，受国际生产分散影响的商品在制度上是最密集的。使用 144 个国家的样本，我们的回归结果表明，制度密集型出口的专业化，尤其是零散商品，有助于各国改善法治。此外，