Why are highly educated people more supportive of international trade? Two competing explanations exist for this empirical finding. On the one hand, the economic interest approach suggests that the highly educated realize that trade can benefit them economically. On the other hand, the ideational perspective argues that this relationship arises because highly educated people are more cosmopolitan, and cosmopolitanism is positively related to support for trade. To contribute to this debate on the education–trade attitude nexus, we present and empirically test four hypotheses. Using data from the PEW Global Attitudes survey (2014) for 36 countries at various levels of development, we find that as expected by the economic interest approach, the effect of education on people's perceptions of the consequences of trade is conditional on respondents’ individual and subnational economic context. The results thus show that economic interest at least partly explains education's effects on public opinion towards trade. Beyond adding to this specific debate, the research note makes several broader contributions to research on trade and public opinion.

为什么受过高等教育的人更支持国际贸易？这一实证发现存在两种相互竞争的解释。一方面，经济利益方法表明，受过高等教育的人意识到贸易可以使他们在经济上受益。另一方面，观念观点认为，这种关系的产生是因为受过高等教育的人更具有世界性，而世界主义与对贸易的支持呈正相关。为了促成这场关于教育与贸易态度关系的辩论，我们提出并实证检验了四个假设。利用 PEW 全球态度调查（2014 年）对 36 个处于不同发展水平的国家的数据，我们发现，正如经济利益方法所预期的那样，教育对人们的影响 对贸易后果的看法取决于受访者的个人和地方经济背景。因此，结果表明，经济利益至少部分解释了教育对公众舆论对贸易的影响。除了增加这一具体辩论之外，该研究报告还对贸易和公众舆论研究做出了一些更广泛的贡献。