Beggar Thy Neighbour: British Imports during the Inter-War Years and the effect of the 1932 tariff

With the competitiveness of UK manufacturing declining steadily during the interwar period, and a significant rise in unemployment in the early 1930s, the UK government responded by introducing the General Tariff in February 1932 in an attempt to halt the increase in unemployment and the deterioration of the current account. This paper focuses formally on UK aggregate imports in the inter-war years, by estimating an import demand function on a new data set, and considers the effectiveness of this fundamental change in trade policy.