The Empire Project: Trade Policy in Interwar Canada

Markus Lampe, Kevin O'Rourke, Lorenz Reiter and Yoto Yotov

No 31238, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper uses a new dataset on the universe of Canadian imports and tariffs between 1924 and 1936, disaggregated into 1697 goods originating in 112 countries, to analyze the impact on Canadian imports of interwar Canadian trade policy, including the 1932 Ottawa trade agreements. Rather than use a dummy variable approach, we compute the impact of individual tariffs which varied substantially across goods, trade partners, and time. We develop a novel method of controlling for multilateral resistances in the context of a one-country dataset, and perform a variety of counterfactual exercises to determine the impact of tariffs on trade flows. The overall impact of post-1929 tariff shifts, including the 1932 agreements, was relatively small, reflecting the fact that Canadian trade policy was already highly protectionist: trade agreements can have heterogenous effects on participants because the shocks involved are different. Compared with a free trade counterfactual, the impact of the overall structure of protection on the level and composition of trade was large.

JEL-codes: F1 F13 F14 N72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-int
Note: DAE ITI
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31238.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Empire project: Trade policy in interwar Canada (2025)
Working Paper: The Empire Project: Trade Policy in Interwar Canada (2024)
Working Paper: The Empire Project: Trade Policy in Interwar Canada (2024)
Working Paper: The Empire Project: Trade Policy in Interwar Canada (2023)
Working Paper: The Empire Project: Trade Policy in Interwar Canada (2023)
Working Paper: The Empire Project: Trade Policy in Interwar Canada (2023)
Working Paper: The Empire Project: Trade Policy in Interwar Canada (2023)
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:nbr:nberwo:31238

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31238

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().