Simposio de Análisis Económico for helpful comments. The views expressed in this papers are those solely of the authors and do not reflect the views of Banco de España or the Eurosystem.

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Despite the general belief among economists on the growth-enhancing role of international trade and significant trade opening over the past 25 years, the growth performance of many developing economies, especially of those in Latin America and Africa, has been disappointing. While this poor growth performance has many potential causes, in this paper I argue that part of the reason may be related to the interaction between weak institutions and trade. In particular, I construct a model in which trade opening in societies with weak institutions (in particular autocratic and elite-controlled political systems) may lead to worse economic policies. The reason is that general equilibrium price effects of taxation and expropriation in closed economies also hurt the elites, and this puts a natural barrier against inefficient policies. Trade openness removes this barrier and enables groups with political power to exercise this power in more inefficient ways. * I am indebted to Daron Acemoglu, Pol Antràs, Guido Lorenzoni and Jaume Ventura for invaluable guidance, to Raphael Auer, Karna Basu, Veronica Rappoport and Tal Regev for very helpful comments and to Francesco Giavazzi for very helpful comments and for allowing me to use his data. I have also benefited from suggestions by participants at the MIT Macroeconomics Lunch and the MIT International Seminar. Financial support from the Bank of Spain is gratefully acknwoledged. All remaining errors are my own.

This paper analyses the long-run growth rates of advanced economies, based on demographic factors. To this end, growth is broken down into two components: growth in productivity (GDP per working-age person) and the projected rate of growth of the working-age population. Productivity is assumed to grow in the longrun at a constant rate equal to that of the technology leader, whereas the demographic projections are those of the United Nations. This simple methodology abstracts from other factors normally considered in the literature on long-term growth, such as the convergence process (we focus on advanced economies) and heterogeneity in participation and employment rates. However, the results do not differ much from those obtained using these other approaches (which are richer, but also more speculative), although the growth rates turn out to be somewhat lower in most cases. They indicate a general deceleration of growth in advanced economies in the coming two decades, due to a slowdown in working-age population growth. Japan, Germany, Italy and Spain face the least favourable growth dynamics in our sample, as these countries face reductions in the size of their workforces. By 2050 France and the United Kingdom could have overtaken Germany to become the largest economies in Europe. In the case of Spain (whose working-age population is expected to peak in 2024) the growth rate of GDP will progressively decline to just below 2% over the following decade.