Megan Haasbroek defends PhD on trade and industrial policy in emerging markets

Over the past three decades, international trade liberalisation has spurred economic growth across many low- and middle-income countries, but it has also contributed to rising inequality. Haasbroeks dissertation sheds light on the crucial role of market failures in shaping these unequal outcomes. Her research investigates three key sources of market failures and their implications for trade and industrial policy.

Great importance for inclusive and effective policymaking

First, she looks at how companies use middlemen to find trading partners, and how their presence affects the benefits of trade liberalisation. Second, she examines how domestic transport costs affect the regional benefits from trade, finding that lowering import tariffs does not markedly affect employment in areas with poor international connections. Finally, Megan investigates the fact that compulsory land acquisition, or governments taking private land for public use, is increasingly used to stimulate private investment in large-scale export-oriented manufacturing. She finds that banning compulsory acquisition has led to fewer new entrants into manufacturing but more industrial jobs. In each case, market failures influence how much businesses are exposed to policies and how they react to these; understanding the impact of market failures is thus of great importance for inclusive and effective policymaking.

About Megan Haasbroek

Megan Haasbroek is a PhD candidate in Economics at Erasmus School of Economics and Tinbergen Institute, supervised by Prof. Maarten Bosker and Dr Sacha Kapoor. She is also a postdoctoral researcher at BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo. Haasbroek holds a Research Masters degree in Macroeconomics and International Economics from Tinbergen Institute. Her research interests lie at the intersection of international trade, economic geography, and development economics. By combining insights from trade theory and microeconomics with empirical evidence, she explores how policy impacts firms in developing countries, with a special focus on how market frictions amplify or mitigate policy effects.