Of course, you can't trade if you can't communicate, right? That's a no-brainer. But Hyejin Ku and Asaf Zussman has helped that discussion further by quantifying it. In their paper in the Journal of Economics Behavior and Organization entitled "Lingua franca: The role of English in international trade," they find that the better the countries speak English (what we consider as the lingua franca in international trade), the more "connected" they are to international trade:
"By constructing and employing a new dataset based on a standardized test of English and using an augmented gravity model we find that English proficiency has a strong and statistically significant effect on trade flows."
Like I said, it goes without saying that you have to have a common language to start trading with other countries. But what's interesting to me is that this paper finds that the more proficient the country is in speaking English, the higher the trade. Of course, this takes into consideration other factors that might affect the size of trade. But still, this is interesting finding.
I mean this proves one point that I was reflecting on before. I remember back then someone telling me that it would help to start learning how to speak Chinese given the rising economic influence of China in terms of world trade. In a nutshell, she's saying Chinese will be the next lingua franca. But I have my reservations on that. For non-English speaking countries, it would cost more than benefit for countries to learn Chinese especially after years of learning English. In any case, the Chinese has already began to learn to speak English for some time now, so why go the other direction?
No my dear. English has started it, and English is here to stay.