An Application of the Gravity Model to International Trade in Narcotics

Abstract

The transnational traffic of narcotics has had undeniable impacts on international development, for instance, stagnant economic growth in Myanmar (Chin, 2009), unsustainable agricultural practices in Yemen (Robins, 2016), and human security threats in Columbia (Thoumi, 2013). Furthermore, globalization is a catalyst for the transnational narcotics traffic (Robins, 2016; Aas, 2007; Kelly, Maghan & Serio, 2005). Several qualitative studies exist on the transnational narcotics traffic, yet few quantitative studies examine the issue. There is thus an opportunity for novel quantitative studies on the general question: “what are the main economic factors that influence the transnational traffic of narcotics between countries?” This study looked at the specific question: “are distance and economic size correlated with the volume of narcotics traffic between countries?” This study chose the gravity model as it centres on bilateral trade (Tinbergen, 1962), accounts for trade barriers (Kalirajan, 2008) and is empirically robust (Anderson 2011). This study defined a basic functional gravity model relating a proxy of the narcotics traffic to distance and economic size. Four augmented functional gravity models were also advanced to address omitted variable bias. The research was limited conceptually to cross sectional and pooled time series data. In addition, the data was also limited practically to a convenience sample of secondary data drawn from: the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) (2016a) Individual Drug Seizures (IDS); the World Bank’s (2016) World Development Indicators; and the CEPII’s GeoDist (2016) datasets. This study used a novel “dosage” approach to unit standardization to overcome the challenge posed by the many measures and forms of narcotics. The study used the Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood (PPML) estimator as its estimations of the gravity model are consistent (Gourieroux et al., 1984), allow heteroscedasticity (Silva & Tenreyro, 2006) and avoid back transformation bias (Cox et al., 2008). The evidence analyzed in this study seem to indicate that the gravity model may not be applicable in its current form to the transnational narcotics traffic among countries that report drug seizures to the UNODC. However, the sampling method and the choice of proxy are likely to influence these findings. Moreover, the low explanatory power of the gravity model for the narcotics traffic, reflected in the values of the pseudo-R-squared coefficient of determination, indicates that other factors are at play. For instance, authors such as Asad and Harris (2003) and Thoumi (2003) argue that institutions could be a key factor in the narcotics traffic. Future empirical research into this topic could build on the theses findings to introduce new proxies and to explore alternate theoretical frameworks.