IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/intecp/978-1-349-14543-0_10.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Political Economy of Administering Trade Laws

In: International Trade Policy and the Pacific Rim

Author

Listed:
  • Wolfgang Mayer

    (University of Cincinnati)

  • Elhanan Helpman

    (Tel Aviv University)

Abstract

Domestic industries can be protected from foreign competition through a vast array of policy measures. Some measures — such as import tariffs, quantitative restrictions, and anti-dumping and countervailing duties — are aimed explicitly at strengthening the competitive position of domestic firms, while others — such as product standards, testing and labelling requirements, and even certain types of sales taxes2 — have differently stated aims but the same ultimate effects of industry protection. Students of the political economy of international trade assert that both explicit and implicit measures of protection are the result of governments’ attempts to maximize their political power. In a democracy, this generally means that a government legislates and administers laws with the objective of maximizing its chances of being re-elected.

Suggested Citation

  • Wolfgang Mayer & Elhanan Helpman, 1999. "The Political Economy of Administering Trade Laws," International Economic Association Series, in: John Piggott & Alan Woodland (ed.), International Trade Policy and the Pacific Rim, chapter 10, pages 245-265, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-349-14543-0_10
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-14543-0_10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    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:pal:intecp:978-1-349-14543-0_10. 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    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.