Do trade reforms that significantly reduce import barriers lead to faster economic growth? In the two decades since Rodríguez and Rodrik's (2000) critical survey of empirical work on this question, new research has tried to overcome the various methodological problems that have plagued previous...

This survey reviews the broad changes in U.S. trade policy over the course of the nation's history. Import tariffs have been the main instrument of trade policy and have had three main purposes: to raise revenue for the government, to restrict imports and protect domestic producers from foreign...

Taiwan was perhaps the first developing country to adopt an export-oriented trade strategy after World War II. The factors usually associated with big shifts in policy--a macroeconomic crisis, a change in political power or institutions, lobbying by export interests, pressure from international...

In 1960, South Korea's exports were about 1 percent of GDP, and the country's ability to import depended almost entirely on US aid. After changing its foreign exchange and trade policies in the mid-1960s, Korea saw a surge in exports to more than 10 percent of GDP by the end of the decade. What...

In the 1950s, many economists believed that import substitution - policies to restrict imports of manufactured goods - was the best trade strategy to promote industrialization and economic growth in developing countries. By the mid-1960s, there was widespread disenchantment with the results of...

The decade from 1985 to 1995 was an unprecedented period of declining barriers to global trade. The reform wave was especially pronounced in developing countries where overvalued currencies were eliminated, quantitative import restrictions dismantled, and import tariffs reduced. What accounts...

This paper examines the political economy of U.S. trade policy around the time of the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, a period when policy was unconstrained by trade agreements. We consider a model of politically-optimal trade policy for a large country that can influence its terms of trade and...

Britain's repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was the signature trade policy event of the nineteenth century. This paper provides a quantitative general equilibrium evaluation of the repeal on sectoral output and employment, factor prices and income distribution, international trade and the terms of...

Korea's real exchange rate has displayed a mild downward trend since the 1980s, with fluctuations of ±20 percent around that trend. This pattern is surprising because the classic Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson framework suggests that countries experiencing rapid growth in the productivity of their...

This paper provides answers to two questions. The first question is which international monetary regime is best for economic performance? One based on fixed exchange rates: including the gold standard and its variants? Adjustable peg regimes such as the Bretton Woods system and the European...