Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
Introduction
The potential net economic and social benefits available to almost every country if they were to open their economies to international trade have been well known and clearly articulated since at least the eighteenth century (Irwin 1996). Yet national governments continue to intervene in markets for goods, services, capital, and labor in ways that alter the location of production, consumer expenditure, and thus also international commerce. Certainly transport and communication costs of doing business across borders have fallen enormously over the centuries, lowering natural barriers to trade. Governmental barriers to trade, however, have fluctuated widely around both upward and downward long-run trends.
The objectives of this chapter are threefold: to review evidence on the changing extent of global trade restrictions resulting from government policies over the past 100+ years; to assess prospects for trade policy changes over coming decades, drawing on current political economy theory and evidence; and to estimate the annual cost in terms of economic welfare forgone in high-income and developing countries of those trade-restricting policies at various points in time retrospectively from 1900 and prospectively to 2050.
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