Small economies rarely embrace free trade, a fact that is commonly explained as a consequence of the government's use of trade policy to redistribute income. But why is this redistribution typically biased in favor of import-competing sectors and is consequently trade restricting rather than trade promoting? This remains an important puzzle in trade policy. Most models assume the puzzle away by restricting the government set of policies or else generate the opposite, and empirically counterfactual, prediction--that trade policy has a pro-trade bias (e.g. Grossman-Helpman AER 1994). We show that if the government's objective reflects a concern for inequality, or diminishing marginal political support from factor owners, then trade policy exhibits anti-trade bias. Importantly the mechanism that we analyze generates the anti-trade bias independently of whether factors are specific or mobile across sectors. The mechanism also generates an anti-trade bias between large countries even after they sign reciprocal trade agreements that eliminate any terms-of-trade motivation for the use of trade protection.
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Paper provided by EconWPA in its series International Trade with number
0310003.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Grossman, Gene M & Helpman, Elhanan, 1994.
"Protection for Sale,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 84(4), pages 833-50, September.
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Gene M. Grossman & Elhanan Helpman, 1992.
"Protection For Sale,"
NBER Working Papers
4149, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Panagariya, Arvind & Rodrik, Dani, 1993.
"Political-Economy Arguments for a Uniform Tariff,"
International Economic Review,
Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 34(3), pages 685-703, August.
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