In the mid-1950's, Turkey was a much richer country than Korea. With about the same population, Turkish GNP was about three times that of Korea, Turkish exports were fifteen times those of Korea, and the Turkish savings rate was much higher than Korean. By 1980, the situation was dramatically...

This paper reexamines current understanding of the political economy of protection. To date, work has centered on determinants of the height of protection and its form - tariffs, quantitative restrictions, and voluntary export restraints. It is argued that examining the structure of protection...

Until NAFTA, analyses of preferential trading arrangements began by assuming a customs union with a common external tariff, and the differences between customs unions and free trade agreements (FTAs) have been little analyzed. This paper points to some of the differences between FTAs and customs...

This paper assesses the theoretical and empirical basis for American labor union leaders' contention that imports have been a big source of job loss in the United States. It is shown, first, that identification of job losses "due to imports" is exceptionally difficult because economic growth...

The results of recent empirical research show that the actual determinants of the form and substance of protection have little to do with the implicit classroom model of benevolent social guardians intent upon maximizing a Benthamite social utility function. This has led to efforts to understand...

In this paper it is argued that there is an important protectionist bias inherent in free trade agreements which is not present in custom unions. In any customs union or free trade agreement, one of the critical issues concerns "rules of origin." In a free trade agreement rules of origin have an...

This paper focuses on the effects of rules of origin in Free Trade Areas. We first point out that even rules of origin which are not restrictive, namely those which do not raise costs of production, have very pronounced effects on trade and investment flows. We then look at some different ways...

Ideas with regard to trade policy and economic development have changed radically since the 1950s. Then and now, it was recognized that trade policy was central to the overall design of policies for economic development. But in the early days, there was a broad consensus that trade policy for...

My topic is the question: what difference does the set of commercial policies chosen by a developing country make to its rate of economic growth? Three points are salient. First, in its present state, trade theory provides little guidance as to the role of trade policy and trade strategy in...

This paper outlines the salient characteristics of competing models of economic regulation and controls. It then examines the evolution of the American sugar program from 1934 to 1987 in the light of these models. While lobbying and other features of traditional models were clearly important,...