IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/auu/hpaper/128.html

Effective Rates of Protection in an Industrialising, Settler Economy: Estimates for Victoria (Australia) in 1880

Author

Listed:
  • Brian D. Varian

Abstract

This study estimates effective rates of protection for 33 manufacturing industries in Victoria in 1880. It emerges that several industries received negative effective rates of protection. Overall, the effective rates of protection suggest that the magnitude of protection in late-nineteenthcentury Victoria was considerably less than in the other industrialising, settler economies of Canada and the United States—to a more pronounced degree than suggested by nominal tariff levels. The very high correlation between nominal tariffs and effective rates of protection exhibited by colonial Victoria should enhance the confidence of economic historians using the former as a proxy for the latter.

Suggested Citation

  • Brian D. Varian, 2025. "Effective Rates of Protection in an Industrialising, Settler Economy: Estimates for Victoria (Australia) in 1880," CEH Discussion Papers 02, Centre for Economic History, Research School of Economics, Australian National University.
    • Handle: RePEc:auu:hpaper:128
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cbe.anu.edu.au/researchpapers/CEH/WP202502.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. G. R. Hawke, 1975. "The United States Tariff and Industrial Protection in the Late Nineteenth Century," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 28(1), pages 84-99, February.
    2. C.B. Schedvin, 1990. "Staples and regions of Pax Britannica," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 43(4), pages 533-559, November.
    3. Giovanni Federico & Antonio Tena-Junguito, 2016. "World trade, 1800-1938: a new data-set," Working Papers 0093, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).
    4. Klein, Alexander & Meissner, Christopher, 2024. "Did Tariffs Make American Manufacturing Great? New Evidence from the Gilded Age," CEPR Discussion Papers 19619, Centre for Economic Policy Research.
    5. Harris, Richard & Keay, Ian & Lewis, Frank, 2015. "Protecting infant industries: Canadian manufacturing and the national policy, 1870–1913," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 15-31.
    6. Réka Juhász & Claudia Steinwender, 2024. "Industrial Policy and the Great Divergence," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 16(1), pages 27-54, August.
    7. John K. Wilson & Martin P. Shanahan, 2012. "Did Good Institutions Produce Good Tariffs? Evidence From Tariff Protection In Colonial Victoria," Australian Economic History Review, Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 52(2), pages 128-147, July.
    8. Brian D. Varian, 2024. "The unavailing origin of Australian protectionism? Victoria's McCulloch Tariff of 1866," CEH Discussion Papers 08, Centre for Economic History, Research School of Economics, Australian National University.
    9. Brian D. Varian, 2024. "Market integration and a lower-productivity economy: the case of Australian federation and Queensland’s manufacturing sector, 1897–1906," CEH Discussion Papers 06, Centre for Economic History, Research School of Economics, Australian National University.
    10. V. Sundararajan, 1970. "The Impact of the Tariff on Some Selected Products of the U.S. Iron and Steel Industry, 1870–1914," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 84(4), pages 590-610.
    11. Alexander, Patrick D. & Keay, Ian, 2019. "Responding to the First Era of Globalization: Canadian Trade Policy, 1870–1913," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 79(3), pages 826-861, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Vicente Pinilla & Agustina Rayes, 2017. "Why did Argentina become a super-exporter of agricultural and food products during the Belle Époque (1880-1929)?," Working Papers 0107, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).
    2. Brian D. Varian, 2024. "The unavailing origin of Australian protectionism? Victoria's McCulloch Tariff of 1866," CEH Discussion Papers 08, Centre for Economic History, Research School of Economics, Australian National University.
    3. Vicente Pinilla & Agustina Rayes, 2019. "How Argentina became a super-exporter of agricultural and food products during the First Globalisation (1880–1929)," Cliometrica, Springer;Cliometric Society (Association Francaise de Cliométrie), vol. 13(3), pages 443-469, September.
    4. Ian Keay & Brian D. Varian, 2024. "The impact of preferential market access: British imports into Canada, 1892–1903," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 57(1), pages 140-164, February.
    5. Mehrdad Vahabi, 2017. "A critical survey of the resource curse literature through the appropriability lens," CEPN Working Papers 2017-14, Centre d'Economie de l'Université de Paris Nord.
    6. Giovanni Federico & Antonio Tena‐Junguito, 2017. "Lewis revisited: tropical polities competing on the world market, 1830–1938," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 70(4), pages 1244-1267, November.
    7. Droller, Federico & Fiszbein, Martin, 2021. "Staple Products, Linkages, and Development: Evidence from Argentina," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 81(3), pages 723-762, September.
    8. Ian W. Mclean, 2004. "Australian Economic Growth in Historical Perspective," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 80(250), pages 330-345, September.
    9. K. Jackson, 1991. "Forest Policy and Trade: The New Zealand experience," Economics Discussion / Working Papers 91-10, The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics.
    10. Timothy Leunig, 2003. "A British industrial success: productivity in the Lancashire and New England cotton spinning industries a century ago," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 56(1), pages 90-117, February.
    11. Sebastian Galiani & Luis F. Jaramillo & Mateo Uribe-Castro, 2025. "Free-riding Yankees: Canada and the Panama Canal," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 30(3), pages 339-382, September.
    12. Giovanni Federico & Antonio Tena-Junguito, 2017. "A tale of two globalizations: gains from trade and openness 1800–2010," Review of World Economics (Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv), Springer;Institut für Weltwirtschaft (Kiel Institute for the World Economy), vol. 153(3), pages 601-626, August.
    13. Colantone, Italo & Ottaviano, Gianmarco & Stanig, Piero, 2021. "The backlash of globalization," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 113860, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    14. Jaworski, Taylor & Keay, Ian, 2022. "Globalization and the spread of industrialization in Canada, 1871–1891," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    15. Irwin, Douglas A., 2000. "Did Late-Nineteenth-Century U.S. Tariffs Promote Infant Industries? Evidence from the Tinplate Industry," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 60(2), pages 335-360, June.
    16. Adam, Marc Christopher, 2019. "Return of the tariffs: The interwar trade collapse revisited," Discussion Papers 2019/8, Free University Berlin, School of Business & Economics.
    17. Nathaniel Lane, 2020. "The New Empirics of Industrial Policy," Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade, Springer, vol. 20(2), pages 209-234, June.
    18. Geloso, Vincent & Kufenko, Vadim & Arsenault-Morin, Alex P., 2023. "The lesser shades of labor coercion: The impact of seigneurial tenure in nineteenth-century Quebec," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 163(C).
    19. Lane, Nathaniel, 2016. "Manufacturing Revolutions: Industrial Policy and Industrialization in South Korea," SocArXiv 6tqax, Center for Open Science.
    20. Patrick Alexander & Ian Keay, 2017. "The Welfare Effects of Protection: A General Equilibrium Analysis of Canada’s National Policy," Staff Working Papers 17-18, Bank of Canada.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • F14 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Empirical Studies of Trade
    • N67 - Economic History - - Manufacturing and Construction - - - Africa; Oceania
    • N77 - Economic History - - Economic History: Transport, International and Domestic Trade, Energy, and Other Services - - - Africa; Oceania

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:auu:hpaper:128. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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/chanuau.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.