Cluster and Discriminat Analyses of the Trade Protectionism

Since every nation is residing in its own historic period, political and economic development level, different political groups have various political and economic pursuits. As a result, its foreign trade policies appear various characteristics. This paper analyzes the protectionism of the foreign trade policies of different countries by cluster analysis and discriminat analysis. Since it is the analysis of nation´s classification, we use observation clustering (Q clustering). The data are indices which measure national protectionism from IMD world competitiveness yearbook (from 2001 to 2005). We classify the protectionism policy in two different forms - the high protectionism and the low protectionism. ANOVA indicates the 5 variables (indices) in the Clustering analysis could better distinguish the difference among clusters. Finally we constitute two suitable models to measure the trade policy mode of any country (high or low protection) by the two famous methods: Canonical discriminat function and fisher´s linear discriminat functions.