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This chapter discusses the manner in which the GATT binds trade instruments, that is, instruments affecting either imported or domestic goods, but not both. The chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2 focuses on the prohibition of quantitative restrictions (QRs) under the GATT. Section 3 discusses tariff protection in the GATT context. Finally, section 4 surveys the GATT disciplines on export subsidies.

This chapter focuses on the appropriate structure and evolution of tariffs in the course of industrial development. It argues that rapid liberalization and harmonization of industrial tariffs across countries and sectors advocated by developed countries in multilateral trade negotiations is not only inconsistent with their own historical experience, but it could also hold back industrialization in developing countries. The longer-term implications for industrialization of a commitment to low and uniform tariffs by developing countries are much more serious than their impact on “static” resource allocation and welfare, they influence the potential for long-term learning and growth. Finally, some proposals are advanced that can help reconcile policy flexibility with multilateral discipline.

This chapter discusses the key concept of tariffs as the key permissive method for countries to regulate trade. There is an examination of tariffs negotiations and concessions which may be considered the single most important success of the GATT/WTO so far. The chapter looks at the role the harmonized system plays in tariff negotiations as well as how counties maintain tariff protections.

This chapter re-states the case for a broader interpretation of the traditional subject matter and purpose of labour law based on a labour market perspective of the subject, and seeks to locate industrial policies such as tariff protection, industry assistance and other economic development initiatives within that broader perspective. The chapter uses the example of the implementation of the New Protection during the early beginnings of federal labour regulation in Australia to explore both the historical contingency of traditional labour law and to illustrate the importance of industrial policy settings to the subject matter and goals of traditional labour law in both industrialised and developing country contexts. The chapter also considers the advantages of including industrial policy within the idea of labour law to both scholarship and labour policymaking and practice.

This chapter presents a commentary by Robert Solow, Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He discusses two questions that arose in his mind as he was listening to the lecture. The first is that it would take a lot of abstemiousness on the part of the rest of the world to accept broad tariff protection in developing countries while at the same time remaining open to exports from those same countries. The second question is: How do you prevent broad tariff protection from leading to rent-seeking and laziness? It also asks: Where do the incentives come from to use the broad protection to be given the infant economy in order to achieve higher productivity, learning, improvement in technology, and rapid growth instead of dissipating it in the collection and consolidation of rents?

This chapter contrasts accounts of the 19th-century New Imperialism by Mackinder and the economist John Hobson. Mackinder and Hobson might be taken as paradigmatic ideologists at two ends of the discussion, but in many respects they shared similar concerns. Both gave University Extension lectures to develop marginal academic disciplines; for Mackinder it was geography, and for Hobson it was a style of economics that was at once historical, sociological, and institutional. They were in thrall to evolutionary biology, framing their analyses consistently with their understanding of the Darwinian revolution. Both began in the Liberal Party but both were led, by the study of imperialism, to question aspects of mid-Victorian Liberalism, particularly its commitment to Free Trade. This was a dramatic ideological shift for each of them although, they arrived at very different destinations, for Mackinder wanted tariff protection around the British Empire, and Hobson wanted income redistribution towards the domestic working class and the renunciation of colonial exploitation.

The Chinese government has intervened extensively to promote industrialization in China, relying on a range of policy instruments. This chapter first discusses the tax and tariff incentives offered to manufacturing firms in China during the last two decades. It then reviews the evidence regarding the impact of tax incentives and tariff protection on firm performance. It shows that China's industrial promotion policies have achieved varied success. The use of tax holidays for exporters and FDI promotion led to much better outcomes than higher tariffs or VAT rebates in backward provinces.

This chapter examines how cellophane, viscose rayon's sister industry, caught the fancy of the elites during the 1930s. It first considers how cellophane enabled the concentration of corporate power in the global viscose trade. In her 1929 book Labor and Silk, Grace Hutchins probed the interlocking corporate spheres of rayon manufacturing interests. In August 1931 Frank William Taussig and Harry Dexter White published “Rayon and the Tariff: The Nature of an Industrial Prodigy,” an essay addressing the financial advantages the viscose rayon industry had obtained through tariff protections. Over the 1930s, viscose rayon and cellophane, despite being chemically identical and produced by the same technology, traveled widely divergent paths in the public imagination. Cellophane became emblematic of something entertainingly novel, the camp chic of its day. In contrast, rayon assumed a tawdry, even sinister aspect. Viscose even became the stuff of medical quackery, with a special flourish of imitation hucksterism.

This chapter examines various developments in economics that are part of the present and will contend against the neoclassical tradition for recognition in the future. Industrial countries, including the United States, have already become deeply concerned with the economic ideas and more especially their practice in Japan. The chapter considers some of the lessons to come and that are coming from Japan, such as the industry–government cooperation and investment in human capital, It also discusses a number of ways to escape market discipline and deal with competition, including a return to tariff protection, and how the distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics will blur and disappear due to factors such as the dynamic of prices and wages as a determinant of both inflation and unemployment. Finally, it comments on the future of domestic monetary and fiscal policy in relation to a nation's international position.

This chapter focuses on the era of the merchants, the time of what is variously called merchant capitalism or mercantilism, a new and expanding world in which markets—and money—were strongly emergent. The mercantilist era lasted for 300 years, from about the middle of the fifteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth. The chapter considers various developments that were reflected in the economic attitudes and policies in the age of the merchants, including the proliferation of trade, the rise of the merchant class, the voyages of discovery to America and the Far East, and the appearance and consolidation of the authority of the modern state. It also discusses the close association between the merchant interest and the national state. Finally, it examines policies such as state intervention on behalf of industry, tariff protection, a policy on the balance of payments, and the emergence of the great modern corporation.