Accelerating and growth effects of trade openness across OIC countries

Accelerating and growth effect of trade openness are controversial subjects that has been subjected to a whole literature. This paper investigates whether trade openness accelerates income per capita convergence process across OIC countries. For this purpose, we used convergence-growth equation that include three trade openness measures i.e. intra-trade openness, extra(outside)-trade openness and overall trade openness and dynamic GMM-SYS panel data estimator. We find that growth effect of trade openness varies by different openness proxies and by income groups. Coefficients of openness proxies show that growth effect of extra (outside)-trade openness is greater than intra- trade openness. Our results also show that overall openness trade and intra-openness trade proxies have dampened GDP per capita convergence process. But, extra (outside)-trade openness has accelerated this process.