A Century of American Tariff and Unemployment Rates

Draft: March 5, 2013 Comments Welcome Abstract Conventional wisdom holds that protectionism is counter‐cyclic; tariffs, quotas and the like grow during recessions. While that may have been a valid description of the data before the First World War, it is now inaccurate. Since the Second World War, protectionism has not been counter‐cyclic; tariffs and non‐tariff barriers simply do not rise systematically during downturns. I document this new stylized fact with a panel of data covering over 180 countries and 40 years, using over a dozen measures of protectionism and six of business cycles. I test and reject a number of potential reasons why protectionism is no longer counter‐cyclic. A “diagnosis of exclusion” leads me to believe that modern economics may well be responsible for the decline in protectionism’s cyclic behavior; economists are more united in their disdain for protectionism than virtually any other concept. This in turn leaves one optimistic that the level of protectionism will continue to decline along with its cyclicality.

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