Protection and the British rayon industry during the 1920s

Brian Varian

Business History, 2022, vol. 64, issue 6, 1131-1148

Abstract: The Finance Act of 1925 imposed upon rayon yarn an excise duty of 1 s. per lb. and an import duty of 2 s. per lb. This article argues that the difference between the excise and import duties was not intended as classic protection. Rather, the difference was intended only to indemnify British producers for the excise-wrought decline in domestic consumption by means of an offsetting reduction of imports. This article then estimates that, had the rayon duties been removed in 1926, the share of imports in Britain’s growing consumption of rayon yarn would have increased from one-tenth to at least one-quarter. Trade policy had secured the domestic market for British rayon firms prior to the formation of an international cartel in 1927. More broadly, this article instantiates that trade policy was considerably distorting the British market for manufactured goods well before the landmark Import Duties Act of 1932.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00076791.2020.1753699 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:bushst:v:64:y:2022:i:6:p:1131-1148

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FBSH20

DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2020.1753699

Access Statistics for this article

Business History is currently edited by Professor John Wilson and Professor Steven Toms

More articles in Business History from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().