Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fth/harver/2010.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Who Protected and Why? Tariffs the World Around 1870-1938

Author

Listed:
  • Christopher Blattman
  • Michael A. Clemens
  • Jeffrey G. Williamson
Abstract
This paper uses a new database to establish a set of tariff facts that have not been well appreciated: tariff rates in Latin America were far higher than anywhere else in the century before the Great Depression; while lower than Latin America, tariffs were far higher in the European periphery and the Englishspeaking new world than they were in the European core; tariff rates rose everywhere in the periphery up to 1900, and then moderated a bit up to WWI; and the great anti-global leap during the 1930s in Latin American and the European periphery was not new policy territory since these two regions had plenty of previous experience with very high tariffs. These world tariff facts need an explanation, especially since economic historians have pretty much ignored them while devoting so much attention to Europe. As we search for the explanations, we find that modern endogenous tariff theory isn’t quite up to the task. The paper uses this world wide sample of 35 countries as a panel to explore competing hypotheses as to what drove policy in the century before WWII: revenue motivation; optimal tariffs; strategic tariffs; deindustrialization fears; Stolper-Samueson forces; and many more. The world environment mattered. Trading partners mattered. Domestic geography, factor endowments, institutions and politics mattered.

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher Blattman & Michael A. Clemens & Jeffrey G. Williamson, 2003. "Who Protected and Why? Tariffs the World Around 1870-1938," Harvard Institute of Economic Research Working Papers 2010, Harvard - Institute of Economic Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:fth:harver:2010
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/pub/hier/2003/HIER2010.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Trade Openness / Tariff rates
      by kdmtz in Devecondata on 2015-12-14 19:15:00

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ayuso-Díaz, Alejandro, 2022. "Natural trading partners versus empires in East and Southeast Asia regional integration (1840-1938)," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 63(C).
    2. Francisco J. Buera & Alexander Monge‐Naranjo & Giorgio E. Primiceri, 2011. "Learning the Wealth of Nations," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 79(1), pages 1-45, January.
    3. Frederic L. Pryor, 2004. "Economic Systems of OECD Nations: Impact and Evolution," Papers on Economics and Evolution 2004-14, Philipps University Marburg, Department of Geography.
    4. Kevin H. O'Rourke & Jeffrey G. Williamson, 2002. "From Malthus to Ohlin: Trade, Growth and Distribution Since 1500," CEG Working Papers 20023, Trinity College Dublin, Department of Economics.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fth:harver:2010. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Thomas Krichel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ieharus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.