Robustness of the KOF index of economic globalisation

The KOF indices of globalisation are the most used globalisation measures in international economics literature, but it uses the nominal trade openness measure to construct the globalisation index. In this paper, we use real trade openness instead of nominal trade openness and recalculate the KOF economic globalisation index over the period 1970–2013. Using the panel data regressions for 146 countries, we revisit the economic globalisation–economic growth nexus to investigate the robustness of the KOF economic globalisation index. We consider several possibilities in model specifications, and the results show that using nominal trade openness measure in calculating the KOF globalisation index is statistically robust. In addition, the KOF economic globalisation index in logarithmic form introduces a more robust outlook in the panel data regressions—a lower bias is emerged by considering different trade openness measures to calculate the globalisation level.