Aspects Of The Political Economy Of Protection

This book examines how trade policy is determined in democratic countries, and illustrates how protectionist policies are engendered by political processes that allow groups to pursue their own interests.

This clear, concise summary of the in-depth analyses presented in The Political Economy of American Trade Policy examines the level, form, and evolution of American trade protection. In case studies of trade barriers imposed during the 1980s to help the steel, semiconductor, automobile, lumber, wheat, and textile and apparel industries, the contributors trace the evolution of efforts to obtain protection, protectionist measures, and their results. A chapter assessing the common themes that emerge from the studies concludes that the focus of current trade law is exclusively on the individual protection-seeking industries, with little regard for indirect effects on using industries or for consumers. Reform could usefully take these effects into account. This volume will interest policymakers, business executives, and anyone interested in trade policy formulation and practice.

The Political Economy of Protection explains why countries, especially developing countries, change their trade policies over the course of history. It does so through an interdisciplinary approach, which borrows analyses from both political science and economics. While the central focus of this book is to explain historical changes in trade policy in one country, Chile, it is broadly relevant for students, scholars, and trade specialists interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the politics and economics of international trade. Given the intensifying public debates about the benefits of globalization, the author provides a uniquely rigorous yet interdisciplinary analysis of the forces that shape trade policy decisions, not just in Chile, but throughout the world.

The Political Economy of Protection explains why countries, especially developing countries, change their trade policies over the course of history. It does so through an interdisciplinary approach, which borrows analyses from both political science and economics. While the central focus of this book is to explain historical changes in trade policy in one country, Chile, it is broadly relevant for students, scholars, and trade specialists interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the politics and economics of international trade. Given the intensifying public debates about the benefits of globalization, the author provides a uniquely rigorous yet interdisciplinary analysis of the forces that shape trade policy decisions, not just in Chile, but throughout the world.

Over the past two decades there has been a gradual but fundamental change in the nature of trade protection. Even as international negotiation has succeeded in reducing tariffs to low levels, national governments have resorted to a range of increasingly intricate policies to protect their domestic industries from foreign competition. Direct quantitative restrictions on international trade have become particularly widespread. Such nontariff barriers often have very different effects from tariffs and require careful analysis in their own right. This book presents a systematic overview of the modern theory of trade protection. The material in the book divides naturally into four sections. The first section covers trade restrictions in competitive markets, the second trade restrictions and imperfect competition, the third the political economy of trade protection, and the fourth the theory of policy reform. The presentation makes extensive use of diagrams, with the more difficult mathematics included in six appendixes.

Drawing together leading scholars, the book provides a revealing new map of the US political economy in cross-national perspective.

Protection is a persistent feature of economic policy in developed and developing countries alike. However, it is now widely accepted that high protection holds back economic growth. Why is protection so pervasive when it is widely recognised to be against the national interest of the countries which impose it? This contradiction is the focus of this important volume, first published in 1986. Economists from the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia have written about their countries and draw conclusions on the causes of protection from statistical analysis and from interindustry structure.

The results of recent empirical research show that the actual determinants of the form and substance of protection have little to do with the implicit classroom model of benevolent social guardians intent upon maximizing a Benthamite social utility function. This has led to efforts to understand the political bureaucratic process through which commercial policy is determined, and to the beginnings of a positive theory of protection, sometimes referred to as the "political economy of protection". In this paper the theoretical cases in which protection might be warranted are contrasted to the actual pattern of protection and mechanisms by which protection is decided upon in one open economy--the United states, and the various models attempting to explain the observed pattern of protection and the mechanisms that generate it are surveyed.