Comments and Discussion (2008)
Douglas A. Irwin, Lawrence F. Katz, Robert Z. Lawrence
Brookings Papers on Economic Activity - 2008, 1
Broadberry, Stephen N., Irwin, Douglas A.
Australia had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world in the late nineteenth century, although this exceptional position subsequently eroded over time. This paper compares national income...
Did Import Substitution Promote Growth (2002)
Jel No. F, Douglas A. Irwin, Douglas A. Irwin, Douglas A. Irwin
I thank seminar participants at University College/Trinity in Dublin, the London School of Economics, and the University of Warwick for many helpful comments and suggestions. The views expressed...
Learning-by-Doing Spillovers in the Semiconductor Industry.
Irwin, Douglas A, Klenow, Peter J
The semiconductor industry is often cited as a strategic industry in part because important learning spillovers may justify special industrial policies. Using quarterly, firm-level data on seven...
The Rise of U.S. Antidumping Activity in Historical Perspective
Empirical studies of antidumping activity focus almost exclusively on the period since 1980. This paper puts recent U.S. antidumping experience in historical context by studying the determinants of...
World Commodity Prices: The Role of External Debt and Industrial Country Policies
Gordon C. Rausser, Marjorie B. Rose, Douglas A. Irwin
The domestic support of and protectionist policies toward agriculture in major Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries has been partly responsible for surplus commodity...
THE ANTEBELLUM TARIFF ON COTTON TEXTILES REVISITED
Irwin, Douglas A., Temin, Peter
Recent research has suggested that the U.S. cotton-textile industry would have been wiped out had it not received tariff protection throughout the antebellum period. We reaffirm Taussig s earlier...
New Estimates of the Average Tariff of the United States, 1790 1820
The first order of business for the new Congress under the Constitution of 1787 was raising revenue to fund the government s operation and to service the public debt. On 8 April 1789, two days after...
Lost Exceptionalism? Comparative Income and Productivity in Australia and the UK, 1861-1948*
STEPHEN BROADBERRY, DOUGLAS A. IRWIN
Australia had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world in the late nineteenth century, although this exceptional position subsequently eroded over time. This paper compares national income...
Long-run trends in world trade and income
This paper examines the statistical relationship between world trade and world income (GDP) over three different epochs: the pre-World War I era (1870 1913), the interwar era (1920 1938), and the...
THE THIRD NOEL BUTLIN LECTURE: AUSTRALIAN EXCEPTIONALISM REVISITED
In the late-nineteenth century, Australia had one of the highest levels of income per capita in the world. Over the twentieth century, Australia's exceptional position declined as its high labour...
Causing problems? The WTO review of causation and injury attribution in US Section 201 cases
US safeguard actions have run into problems with the WTO s panel and Appellate Body reviews for failing to ensure that injury caused by non-import factors is not attributed to imports. This paper...
Alexander Hamilton s Report on Manufactures (1791) is a classic document of U.S. economic policy, but its fate in Congress is not well known. It is commonly believed that the report was never...
The Impact of Federation on Australia's Trade Flows
In 1901, six Australian states joined together in political and economic union, creating an internal free trade area and adopting a common external tariff. This paper investigates the impact of...
The Rise of US Anti-dumping Activity in Historical Perspective
Empirical studies of anti-dumping activity focus almost exclusively on the period since 1980. This paper puts recent US anti-dumping experience in historical context by studying the determinants of...
Tariff Incidence in America's Gilded Age
In the late nineteenth century, the United States imposed high tariffs to protect domestic manufacturers from foreign competition. This article examines the magnitude of protection given to...
The Welfare Cost of Autarky: Evidence from the Jeffersonian Trade Embargo, 1807-09
The United States came close to complete autarky in 1808 as a result of a self-imposed embargo on international shipping from December 1807 to March 1809. Monthly prices of exported and imported...
Terms of Trade and Economic Growth in Nineteenth Century Britain.
International trade and economic growth have been considered intimately linked in nineteenth century Britain. Conventional estimates of Britain's gross national product, however, fail to account for...
Three-factor general equilibrium models: a dual, geometric approach
Econometric models
Mercantilism as strategic trade policy: the Anglo-Dutch rivalry for the East India trade
Exports ; International trade ; Economic history
The GATT's contribution to economic recovery in post-war Western Europe
International trade ; Europe
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff: A Quantitative Assessment
In the two years after the imposition of the Smoot-Hawley tariff in June 1930, the volume of U.S. imports fell over 40%. To what extent can this collapse of trade be attributed to the tariff itself...
Explaining America's Surge in Manufactured Exports, 1880-1913
The United States became a net exporter of manufactured goods around 1910 after a dramatic surge in iron and steel exports began in the mid-1890s. This paper argues that natural-resource abundance...
The Political Economy of Agricultural Policy Reform.
Rausser, Gordon C, Irwin, Douglas A
There exists today an opportunity for significant reform of world agricultural policies. The political-economic question is how this reform can be brought to fruition in the face of powerful domestic...
The New Protectionism in Industrial Countries: Beyond the Uruguay Round
Protectionism , Developed countries , International trade , Trade policy , Subsidies , Antidumping ,
The antebellum U.S. iron industry: Domestic production and foreign competition
Davis, Joseph H., Irwin, Douglas A.
This paper presents new annual estimates of U.S. production of pig iron and imports of pig iron products dating back to 1827. These estimates are used to assess the vulnerability of the antebellum...
Trade Blocs, Currency Blocs and the Disintegration of World Trade in the 1930s
Barry Eichengreen, Douglas A. Irwin
The dramatic implosion and regionalization of international trade during the 1930s has often been blamed on the trade and foreign exchange policies that emerged in the interwar period. We provide new...
Trade Politics and the Semiconductor Industry
A coalition of well-organized semiconductor producers along with compliant government agencies (USTR and the Commerce Department) brought about a 1986 trade agreement in which the United States...
The GATT's Contribution to Economic Recovery in Post-War Western Europe
This paper examines the role of trade liberalization under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade (GATT) in promoting economic recovery and growth in Europe in the decade after...
High Tech R&D Subsidies: Estimating the Effects of Sematech
Douglas A. Irwin, Peter J. Klenow
Sparked by concerns about their shrinking market share, 14 leading U.S. semiconductor producers, with the financial assistance of the U.S. government in the form of $100 million in annual subsidies,...
Industry or Class Cleavages over Trade Policy? Evidence from the BritishGeneral Election of 1923
Economists and political scientists have frequently attempted to determine whether trade policy-related political action takes place along factor-lines (such as capital versus labor, as implied by...
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff: A Quantitative Assessment
In the two years after the imposition of the Smoot-Hawley tariff in June 1930, the volume of U.S. imports fell over 40 percent. To what extent can this collapse of trade be attributed to the tariff...
Log-Rolling and Economic Interests in the Passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff
Douglas A. Irwin, Randall S. Kroszner
We analyze Senate roll-call votes concerning tariffs on specific goods in order to understand the economic and political factors influencing the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930....
The Role of History in Bilateral Trade Flows
Barry Eichengreen, Douglas A. Irwin
This paper investigates the theory and evidence that history plays a role in shaping the direction of international trade. Because there are reasons to anticipate a positive correlation between the...
Changes in U.S. Tariffs: Prices or Policies?
In the century after the Civil War, roughly two-thirds of U.S. dutiable imports were subject to specific duties whose ad valorem equivalent was inversely related to the price level. This paper finds...
Four years after passing the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930, Congress enacted the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA), which gave the president the authority to undertake tariff-reduction...
Douglas A. Irwin, Randall S. Kroszner
This paper investigates the factors explaining significant policy change by studying how bipartisan support developed to sustain the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) of 1934. The RTAA...
Higher Tariffs, Lower Revenues? Analyzing the Fiscal Aspects of the "Great Tariff Debate of 1888"
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...
Is Globalization Today Really Different than Globalization a Hunderd Years Ago?
Michael D. Bordo, Barry Eichengreen, Douglas A. Irwin
This paper pursues the comparison of economic integration today and pre 1914 for trade as well as finance, primarily for the United States but also with reference to the wider world. We establish the...
How Did the United States Become a Net Exporter of Manufactured Goods?
The United States became a net exporter of manufactured goods around 1910 after a dramatic surge in iron and steel exports began in the mid-1890s. This paper argues that natural resource abundance...
Tariffs and Growth in Late Nineteenth Century America
Were high import tariffs somehow related to the strong U.S. economic growth during the late nineteenth century? This paper examines this frequently mentioned but controversial question and...
Could the U.S. Iron Industry Have Survived Free Trade After the Civil War?
An unresolved question concerning post-Civil War U.S. industrialization is the degree to which import tariffs protected domestic manufacturers from foreign competition. This paper considers the...
Ohlin Versus Stolper-Samuelson?
This paper examines Bertil Ohlin's analysis of trade policy and factor rewards in the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States. A leading question of the day was...
Does Trade Raise Income? Evidence from the Twentieth Century
Douglas A. Irwin, Marko Tervio
Efforts to estimate the effects of international trade on a country's real income have been hampered by the failure to account for the endogeneity of trade. Frankel and Romer recently use a country's...
The Antebellum Tariff on Cotton Textiles Revisited
Recent research has suggested that the antebellum U.S. cotton textile industry would have been wiped out had it not received tariff protection. We reaffirm Taussig's judgment that the U.S. cotton...
Airbus versus Boeing Revisited: International Competition in the Aircraft Market
Douglas A. Irwin, Nina Pavcnik
This paper examines international competition in the commercial aircraft industry. We estimate a discrete choice, differentiated products demand system for wide-body aircraft and examine the...
The Optimal Tax on Antebellum U.S. Cotton Exports
The United States produced about 80 percent of the world's cotton in the decades prior to the Civil War. How much monopoly power did the United States possess in the world cotton market and what...
The Welfare Cost of Autarky: Evidence from the Jeffersonian Trade Embargo, 1807-1809
The United States came close to complete autarky in 1808 as a result of a self-imposed embargo on international shipping from December 1807 to March 1809. Monthly prices of exported and imported...
Interpreting the Tariff-Growth Correlation of the Late Nineteenth Century
Recent research has documented a positive relationship between tariffs and growth in the late nineteenth century. Such a correlation does not establish a causal relationship between tariffs and...
Did Import Substitution Promote Growth in the Late Nineteenth Century?
The positive correlation between import tariffs and economic growth across countries in the late nineteenth century suggests that tariffs may have played a causal role in promoting growth. This paper...
Causing Problems? The WTO Review of Causation and Injury Attribution in U.S. Section 201 Cases
U.S. safeguard actions have run into problems with the WTO's Panel and Appellate Body reviews for failing to ensure that injury caused by non-import factors is not attributed to imports. This paper...
The Aftermath of Hamilton's "Report on Manufactures"
Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures (1791) is a classic document in the history of U.S. economic policy, but its fate in Congress is not well known. It is commonly believed that the report...
Trade Disruptions and America's Early Industrialization
Douglas A. Irwin, Joseph H. Davis
Between 1807 and 1815, U.S. imports of manufactured goods were severely cut by Jefferson's trade embargo, subsequent non-importation measures, and the War of 1812. These disruptions are commonly...
Labor Productivity in Britain and America During the Nineteenth Century
Stephen N. Broadberry, Douglas A. Irwin
A number of writers have recently questioned whether labor productivity or per capita incomes were ever higher in the United Kingdom than in the United States. We show that although the United States...
The Impact of Federation on Australia's Trade Flows
In 1901, six Australian states joined together in political and economic union, creating an internal free trade area and adopting a common external tariff. This paper investigates the impact of...
Antebellum Tariff Politics: Coalition Formation and Shifting Regional Interests
Throughout U.S. history, import tariffs have been put on a sustained downward path in only two instances: from the early-1830s until the Civil War and from the mid-1930s to the present. This paper...
Tariff Incidence in America's Gilded Age
In the late nineteenth century, the United States imposed high tariffs to protect domestic manufacturers from foreign competition. This paper examines the magnitude of protection given to...
The Antebellum U.S. Iron Industry: Domestic Production and Foreign Competition
Joseph H. Davis, Douglas A. Irwin
This paper presents new annual estimates of U.S. production of pig iron and imports of pig iron products dating back to 1827. These estimates are used to assess the vulnerability of the antebellum...
Trade Restrictiveness and Deadweight Losses from U.S. Tariffs, 1859-1961
This paper uses detailed tariff data to calculate the Anderson-Neary trade restrictiveness index (TRI) for the United States in 1859 and annually from 1867 to 1961. The TRI is defined as the uniform...
International Economic Policy: Was There a Bush Doctrine?
Barry Eichengreen, Douglas A. Irwin
While many political scientists and diplomatic historians see the Bush presidency as a distinctive epoch in American foreign policy, we argue that there was no Bush Doctrine in foreign economic...
Mercantilism as Strategic Trade Policy: The Anglo-Dutch Rivalry for the East India Trade.
This paper interprets seventeenth-century mercantilism, when international trade was conducted chiefly by state-chartered monopoly trading companies, in light of recent theories of strategic trade...
Welfare Effects of British Free Trade: Debate and Evidence from the 1840s.
Classical economists engaged in a vigorous debate over whether Britain's tariff reductions in the 1840s should be made contingent on tariff liberalization abroad. Some, notably Robert Torrens,...
Irwin, Douglas A, Kroszner, Randall S
This paper investigates how changes in both institutional incentives and economic interests are important for securing durable changes in economic policy. We study how bipartisan support developed to...
Measures Affecting the Cross-Border Supply of Gambling and Betting Services (DS 285)
IRWIN, DOUGLAS A., WEILER, JOSEPH
The controversial gambling decision of the Appellate Body is mostly important because of examination of the nature of Access under Article XVI GATS, the relationship of that Article to Articles XIV...
Did late-nineteenth-century U.S. tariffs promote infant industries? After earlier failures, the tinplate industry became established and flourished after receiving protection with the 1890 McKinley...
Causing problems? The WTO review of causation and injury attribution in US Section 201 cases
US safeguard actions have run into problems with the WTO s panel and Appellate Body reviews for failing to ensure that injury caused by non-import factors is not attributed to imports. This paper...
Did late-nineteenth-century U.S. tariffs promote infant industries? After earlier failures, the tinplate industry became established and flourished after receiving protection with the 1890 McKinley...
THE ANTEBELLUM TARIFF ON COTTON TEXTILES REVISITED
Irwin, Douglas A., Temin, Peter
Recent research has suggested that the U.S. cotton-textile industry would have been wiped out had it not received tariff protection throughout the antebellum period. We reaffirm Taussig s earlier...
Antebellum Tariff Politics: Regional Coalitions and Shifting Economic Interests
Throughout U.S. history, import tariffs have been put on a sustained downward path in only two instances: from the early 1830s until the Civil War and from the mid-1930s to the present. This paper...
Higher Tariffs, Lower Revenues? Analyzing the Fiscal Aspects of ?The Great Tariff Debate of 1888?
After the Civil War, Congress maintained high import tariffs to pay off the public debt. By the early 1880s the federal government was running large fiscal surpluses revenues exceeded expenditures by...
The Political Economy of Trade Policy: Papers in Honor of Jagdish Bhagwati
Robert C. Feenstra, Gene M. Grossman, Douglas A. Irwin
This collection of papers by former students and colleagues celebrates the profound impact that Jagdish Bhagwati has had on the field of international economics over the past three decades. Bhagwati,...
Political Economy And International Economics: Jagdish Bhagwati
Jagdish Bhagwati, Douglas A. Irwin
Political Economy and International Economics is the fifth volume of collected essays by the noted economist Jagdish Bhagwati. Following Essays in International Economic Theory (edited by Robert...
The Slide to Protectionism in the Great Depression: Who Succumbed and Why?
Barry Eichengreen, Douglas A. Irwin
The Great Depression was marked by protectionist trade policies and the breakdown of the multilateral trading system. But contrary to the presumption that all countries scrambled to raise trade...
Revenue or Reciprocity? Founding Feuds over Early U.S. Trade Policy
The Constitution of 1787 was designed to give Congress powers over trade policy that it lacked under the Articles of Confederation. The Washington administration was split over whether to use these...