This paper examines the Japanese automobile industry to measure the effect of import restriction policy for infant industry. Import restriction policy can provide large amount of domestic demand for producers and help them to acquire the experience of production. It has been said to be a key driving force of the dramatic growth of the Japanese automobile industry. Compared with a subsidy policy, however, an import restriction causes some types of distortions. Conducting the counterfactual exercise, I explore what it would have happened if instead the optimal subsidy had been provided to Japanese automakers. This exercise measures the welfare effect of an actual restriction policy in terms of an optimal one. That is, it quantifies how close the welfare level of the actual policy was to the level of the optimal subsidy policy. From the experimental exercise, I find the fact that the import restriction reached to only 55 percent of the optimal welfare level.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Graduate School of Economics, Hitotsubashi University in its series Discussion Papers with number
2006-23.