The New Industrial Protectionism and the Developing Countries

Gerald K. Helleiner

Chapter 3 in International Economic Disorder, 1980, pp 62-103 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Nation-states have long employed tariffs, non-tariff trade barriers, exchange rates, and other trade incentives and disincentives in pursuit of various national objectives. Governmental interventions in the otherwise ‘free’ flow of goods and services across international boundaries have been rationalised in terms of both economic and political objectives. Among the arguments most frequently heard among economists are those couched in terms of the theory of the second-best, the possibility of exercising market power in order to improve the terms of trade, the infant industry argument, and the pursuit of structural changes which are believed to ‘dynamise’ entire economies in the longer run. Indeed, the qualifications to the general economic case for ‘free’ international trade are so many that, as a recent survey has observed: by now, any bright graduate student, by choosing his assumptions regarding distortions and policy instruments carefully, can produce a consistent model yielding just about any policy conclusion he favoured at the start. To reach his conclusion, moreover, he need not introduce development targets additional to static efficiency. (Diaz-Alejandro, 1975, p. 97)

Keywords: Trade Policy; Trade Barrier; Transnational Corporation; International Economic Order; Voluntary Export Restraint (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1980
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DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-06783-1_3

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