IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/6239.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Higher Tariffs, Lower Revenues? Analyzing the Fiscal Aspects of the "Great Tariff Debate of 1888"

Author

Listed:
  • Douglas A. Irwin

Abstract

After the Civil War, Congress justified high import tariffs (relative to their prewar levels)" as necessary in order to raise sufficient revenue to pay off the public debt. By the early 1880s the federal government was running large and seemingly intractable fiscal surpluses revenues" exceeded expenditures (including debt service and repurchases) by over 40 percent during that" decade. The political parties proposed alternative plans to deal with the surplus: the Democrats" proposed a tariff reduction to reduce customs revenue, the Republicans offered higher tariffs to" reduce imports and customs revenue. This paper examines this debate and attempts to determine" the revenue effects of the proposed tariff changes. The results indicate that the tariff and the price elasticity of U.S. import demand during the 1880s below the maximum revenue rate, and therefore a tariff reduction would have reduced customs" revenue.

Suggested Citation

  • Douglas A. Irwin, 1997. "Higher Tariffs, Lower Revenues? Analyzing the Fiscal Aspects of the "Great Tariff Debate of 1888"," NBER Working Papers 6239, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:6239
    Note: DAE ITI
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w6239.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Jeffrey G. Williamson & Luis Bertola, 2003. "Globalization in Latin America Before 1940," NBER Working Papers 9687, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Austan Goolsbee, 1999. "Evidence on the High-Income Laffer Curve from Six Decades of Tax Reform," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 30(2), pages 1-64.
    3. McKenzie, David & Ozler, Berk, 2011. "The impact of economics blogs," Policy Research Working Paper Series 5783, The World Bank.
    4. Jeffrey G. Williamson, 2003. "Was It Stolper-Samuelson, Infant Industry or Something Else? World Trade Tariffs 1789-1938," NBER Working Papers 9656, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. David McKenzie & Berk Özler, 2014. "Quantifying Some of the Impacts of Economics Blogs," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 62(3), pages 567-597.
    6. Douglas A. Irwin, 2000. "Tariffs and Growth in Late Nineteenth Century America," NBER Working Papers 7639, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Douglas A. Irwin, 2014. "Tariff Incidence: Evidence from U.S. Sugar Duties, 1890-1930," NBER Working Papers 20635, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • N71 - Economic History - - Economic History: Transport, International and Domestic Trade, Energy, and Other Services - - - U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
    • H6 - Public Economics - - National Budget, Deficit, and Debt

    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:nbr:nberwo:6239. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.