"Through a combination of text, quotations, cartoons, tables, charts, and graphs, Bhagwati ... looks at the forces for and against protection."--Jacket.

Chorev focuses on trade liberalization in the United States from the 1930s to the present as she explores the political origins of today's global economy.

Putting tariffs on imported goods or setting other barriers to international trade can be tempting for politicians. They assume that many of their constituents believe that free trade is not fair trade and that other countries aren’t playing by the rules. This belief makes it easy for industry leaders to demand protection for their businesses and their workers—to “put America first.” But Americans should resist the siren calls of protectionism. In this highly relevant protectionism primer, Pierre Lemieux shows what can happen if they don’t. As the author demonstrates, trade between any two countries is fair for the same reasons as exchange between two individuals: it is to the benefit of both. Lemieux carefully refutes the arguments of those who would curtail Americans’ access to the benefits of international commerce—from the claim that we can boost economic growth by reducing imports to the belief that free trade leads to “shipping jobs overseas.” Yes, manufacturing jobs are declining in this country and have been since the 1950s. But, as Lemieux points out, that’s in large part because Americans are making more advanced products more efficiently—that’s our comparative advantage. And this is happening as less-developed countries are producing more labor-intensive, low-tech goods—that’s their comparative advantage. All parties to a trade benefit. Lemieux shows how free trade improves the lives of American consumers, especially the poor. The narrow agenda of the protectionists—to protect a small minority of producers at the expense of millions of their fellow Americans—is the wrong path for an increasingly diverse and complex economy. This concise primer shows you why.

Conventional wisdom holds that free trade is economically beneficial to nations. But this does not prevent industries and interest groups from lobbying their governments for protection, which creates a fear of electoral backlash among politicians hoping to promote free trade. The Limits of Protectionism demonstrates how governments can attain those economic benefits while avoiding the political costs.Michael Lusztig's theoretical model focuses on a process by which protectionists can be pushed to restructure and compete in a global economy. In this process, a small cutback in domestic protection leads to lost market shares at home; producers must then turn to overseas exports, and, as the size of foreign profits grow, former protectionists become active advocates for more and greater free trade opportunities.In a wide-ranging array of case studies—from nineteenth-century Britain to Depression-era United States to contemporary New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, and Mexico—Lusztig reveals that, if skillfully handled, governments can eliminate the obstacles to free trade and enjoy continued economic growth without fear of protectionist groups seeking revenge at the ballot box.

Written in the early 1980s against a backdrop of strengthening calls for a North American free trade agreement, this study examines the protectionist impulses masquerading as efforts to eliminate tariff barriers. In the wake of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the GATT), the popular assumption hailed it as a victory for freer trade. Lazar demonstrates that the trend was in fact towards a new protectionism based on the erection of non-tariff barriers specifically designed to subvert the GATT. In response, he called for a Canadian industrial strategy that promoted Canadian companies and encouraged exports. The New Protectionism is a subtle analysis of the rhetoric and reality of free trade as practised in the early 1980s.

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.

Modern economies become more and more open and the external sector of an economy becomes more and more important. This textbook aims at clarify ing how an open economy functions, in particular at explaining the determi nants of international fiows of commodities and financial assets. It also aims at examining the effects of these fiows on the domestic and international econ omy and the possible policy acti.ons at the national and international level. Particular attention will be paid to the problems of international economic at both the commercial and monetary level. integration Students will be able to read and interpret the balance of payments of a country, evaluating the various types of balance, to explain the behaviour of commercial fiows in the light of the theories studied, to analyze fiows of financial assets according to interest-rate differentials and other elements, to study the forces that determine exchange rates and cause currency crises, to understand the reasons behind international economic integration such as the European Union, to evaluate the effects of national and international policies.