IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ecpoli/v28y2013i76p569-612..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The march of an economic idea? Protectionism isn't counter-cyclic (anymore)
[Is there a consensus among economists in the 1990s?]

Author

Listed:
  • Andrew K. Rose

Abstract

Summary Conventional wisdom holds that protectionism is counter-cyclic; tariffs, quotas and the like grow during recessions. While that may have been a valid description of the data before the First World War, it is now inaccurate. Since the Second World War, protectionism has not been counter-cyclic; tariffs and non-tariff barriers simply do not rise systematically during downturns. I document this new stylised fact with a panel of data covering over 180 countries and 40 years, using over a dozen measures of protectionism and six of business cycles. I test and reject a number of potential reasons why protectionism is no longer counter-cyclic. A ‘diagnosis of exclusion’ leads me to believe that modern economics may well be responsible for the decline in protectionism's cyclic behaviour; economists are more united in their disdain for protectionism than virtually any other concept. This in turn leaves one optimistic that the level of protectionism will continue to decline along with its cyclicality.— Andrew K. Rose

Suggested Citation

  • Andrew K. Rose, 2013. "The march of an economic idea? Protectionism isn't counter-cyclic (anymore) [Is there a consensus among economists in the 1990s?]," Economic Policy, CEPR, CESifo, Sciences Po;CES;MSH, vol. 28(76), pages 569-612.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ecpoli:v:28:y:2013:i:76:p:569-612.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/1468-0327.12017
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Valeria Groppo & Roberta Piermartini, 2014. "Trade Policy Uncertainty and the WTO," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 1437, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    2. Gnangnon Sèna Kimm, 2017. "Empirical Evidence on the Impact of Multilateral Trade Liberalization on Domestic Trade Policy," Global Economy Journal, De Gruyter, vol. 17(3), pages 1-14, September.
    3. Simon J. Evenett, 2021. "Power transition and the regulatory state in large emerging markets: Norm‐breaking after the global financial crisis," Regulation & Governance, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 15(3), pages 472-491, July.

    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:oup:ecpoli:v:28:y:2013:i:76:p:569-612.. 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cebruuk.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.