Book Description

What, if any, are the consequences of anti-Americanism for the U.S. national interest? In this paper, I focus on the economic consequences of anti-Americanism. Although Martin (2007) and many members of the U.S. business community claim anti-Americanism carries serious consequences for U.S. business, Katzenstein and Keohane (2007) find null results. In this paper, I revisit these claims. I first replicate and extend Katzenstein and Keohane's (2007) work, and find some evidence that anti-Americanism may be at work in European purchases of American brand name products. Next, I develop and test several statistical models in which anti-American sentiment is predictive of cross-national variation over time in: (1) sales of Coca-Cola; (2) openings of Starbucks coffee shops; and (3) tourist arrivals and spending in the U.S. The results support the central hypothesis that anti-Americanism is predictive of outcomes harmful to U.S. economic interests. In the case of Coca-Cola, controlling for exchange rates, gross domestic product, temporal effects, and regional variation, there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between favorable attitudes toward the U.S. and sales volume of Coke. Similarly, favorable attitudes toward the U.S. are predictive of store openings of Starbucks around the globe. In the matter of tourism to the U.S., anti-Americanism is a robust predictor of both tourist arrivals and spending in the U.S., controlling for likely competing explanations. The results of this paper shed new light on the extent to which anti-Americanism is significant for U.S. economic interests.