【单选题】

How do people decide whether to trust a country’s investment climate, or the quality of its goods and services (1) , to a degree: places with skilled workers and high technology tend to make (2) stuff; countries with clear laws and clean politicians are more trustworthy. You might suspect, (3) , that plain prejudice also affects trade and capital flows. Three economists have found evidence of (4) that.

As a first (5) , the trio looked atEurobarometer surveys, which frequently askEU citizens how much they trust people from various countries. To the authors, it is much more (6) that different countries give different answers. When two sets of people (7) a country’s reliability differently, cultural (8) may be at work.Because trading with another country may also (9) trust, the economists had to (10) out which causes the other. So (11) rely only onEuropeans’ direct answers about trust, they looked at these in (12) with three long-run factors that might affect prejudices—religion, a history of wars and widespread genetic differences—and used these to try to (13) the effects of cultural biases on trust and trade.
The economists find that cultural biases do drive wide variations (14) trust amongEuropean countries.And after (15) for other factors (such as geography) that also foster trade, they claim to show that culturally driven trust does (16) trade and investment patterns.A、one-standard-deviation increase in their trust measure is (17) with a(n) (18) to trade between two countries of 30%, and a rise in bilateral foreign direct investment of as much as 75%. They also find that high education levels and more information tend to (19) these effects by correcting misconceptions about unfamiliar countries. (20) ignorance, it seems, does even more damage than free traders thought.
A、associatedB、acquainted C、combined
D、concerned