Douglas A Irwin
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 950729 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Douglas A Irwin |
| NOMBRES | Douglas A |
| APELLIDO | Irwin |
| FIRMA | IRWIN D A |
| AFILIACIONES | Dartmouth College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9310-2799 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 44 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 166 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 46 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1988 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Trade disruptions and early US industrialization
Between 1807 and 1815, US imports of manufactured goods were slashed dramatically by a trade embargo, non‐importation measures, and the War of 1812. These disruptions are commonly believed to have promoted the growth of nascent domestic manufacturers and thereby spurred early US industrialization. This paper uses disaggregated data on US industrial production to investigate how this interruption of foreign competition affected domestic manufactur…
Trade Policy, Exchange Rates, and the Globalization Surge of the 1990s
The decision by developing countries to open up their economies to foreign trade and investment in the 1980s and 1990s was a momentous event in world history. How and why did this trade policy revolution take place? Most accounts of trade politics stress domestic interest groups or trade agreements as driving policy changes, but these explanations fail in this period. This paper notes that many import restrictions were imposed for balance of paym…
The Chile Project
Why should historians of economic thought take an interest in Chile? The reason is that the country has been the laboratory for a controversial experiment in free-market economic policies since the early 1970s. That experiment involved the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago, the so-called Chicago Boys who were influenced by Milton Friedman.The basic story is this. In 1973, economic …
Changing the Trade and Development Consensus
Economists became skeptical about the benefits of free trade for developing countries during the Great Depression, but in the 1960s some had come to recognize the problems with import substitution policies and the benefits of encouraging exports. This article examines how four economists who led this transition-Ian Little, Jagdish Bhagwati, Anne Krueger, and Bela Balassa-came to their views and helped build a new professional consensus on trade p…
Economic ideas and Taiwan's shift to export promotion in the 1950s
Taiwan was the first developing country to adopt an export‐oriented trade strategy after World War II. The factors usually associated with big shifts in policy—a macroeconomic crisis, a change in political power or institutions, lobbying by export interests, pressure from international financial institutions—were not present; it was ideas that were key. In 1954, economist S. C. Tsiang proposed that Taiwan boost export earnings rather than squeeze…
How Economic Ideas Led to Taiwan's Shift to Export Promotion in the 1950s
The Economic Consequences of Sir Robert Peel
This paper provides a quantitative general equilibrium evaluation of the repeal of Britain's Corn Laws in 1846. Using a detailed input-output matrix of the British economy in 1841, we find the abolition of Britain's tariff on imported grain left overall welfare roughly unchanged as the static efficiency gains are offset by terms-of-trade losses. Labourers and capital owners gained a slight amount at the expense of landowners. Combining these chan…
Against the Tide
The rise and fall of import substitution
Adam Smith's “tolerable administration of justice” and the Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith argues that a country’s income depends on its labor productivity, which in turn hinges on the division of labor. But why are some countries able to take advantage of the division of labor and become rich, while others fail to do so and remain poor? Smith describes how the security of property rights, through a “tolerable administration of justice,” allows investment and exchange to take place, bringing about economic progress. Recent e…
The Midway and Beyond
Over the last decade, there has been an outpouring of scholarly research on the Chicago school of economics and its leading figures. This paper provides a selective survey of this research, focusing in particular on (1) the origins of a distinctive Chicago economics in the 1930s, (2) the work of Milton Friedman in the 1950s and 1960s in light of the Keynesian consensus of the day, and (3) the relationship between Chicago economists and the idea o…
Clashing over Commerce
Should the United States be open to commerce with other countries, or should it protect domestic industries from foreign competition? This question has been the source of bitter political conflict throughout American history. Such conflict was inevitable, James Madison argued in The Federalist Papers , because trade policy involves clashing economic interests. The struggle between the winners and losers from trade has always been fierce because d…
After Empires
Introduction 1. The Third World and the Creation of UNCTAD 2. The Myopia of the European Community 3. Empires and Shopping Malls 4. The Developing Countries' Most Favoured Partner 5. The Year of Oil 6. North-South Dialogues Epilogue: In the Name of Global Competition
Essays on the Intellectual History of Economics
Rethinking Trade and Commercial Policy Theories
Book Review| November 01 2012 Rethinking Trade and Commercial Policy Theories: Development Perspectives Rethinking Trade and Commercial Policy Theories: Development Perspectives. By Ho, P. Sai-wing. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2010. 406 pp. Cloth$160.00. Douglas A. Irwin Douglas A. Irwin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (2012) 44 (4): 712–715. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-1811469 Views Icon…
Peddling Protectionism
The Smoot–Hawley tariff of 1930, which raised U.S. duties on hundreds of imported goods to record levels, is America's most infamous trade law. It is often associated with—and sometimes blamed for—the onset of the Great Depression, the collapse of world trade, and the global spread of protectionism in the 1930s. Even today, the ghosts of congressmen Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley haunt anyone arguing for higher trade barriers; almost single-handedl…
Peddling Protectionism
The Slide to Protectionism in the Great Depression
The Great Depression was marked by a severe outbreak of protectionist trade policies. But contrary to the presumption that all countries scrambled to raise trade barriers, there was substantial cross-country variation in the movement to protectionism. Specifically, countries that remained on the gold standard resorted to tariffs, import quotas, and exchange controls to a greater extent than countries that went off gold. Just as the gold standard …
Free Trade under Fire
Free trade is always under attack, more than ever in recent years. The imposition of numerous U.S. tariffs in 2018, and the retaliation those tariffs have drawn, has thrust trade issues to the top of the policy agenda. Critics contend that free trade brings economic pain, including plant closings and worker layoffs, and that trade agreements serve corporate interests, undercut domestic environmental regulations, and erode national sovereignty. Wh…
The antebellum U.S. iron industry
The Third Noel Butlin Lecture
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 force participation rate and male‐skewed gender ratio gradually aligned with other countries. A similar reversion occurred in the other important components underlying Australia's high productivity, such as work hours. As the structure of the economy shi…
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 import-competing producers and the costs imposed on export-oriented producers by focusing on changes in the domestic prices of traded goods relative to nontraded goods. The results suggest that the 30 percent average import tariff gave about a 17 percent impli…
Labor productivity in the United States and the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century
"The Aftermath of Hamilton's "Report on Manufactures
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 implemented. Although Hamilton's proposals for bounties (subsidies) failed to receive support, virtually every tariff recommendation was adopted by Congress in early 1792. These tariffs were not highly protectionist because Hamilton feared discouraging imp…
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 fueled the expansion of iron and steel exports in part by enabling a sharp reduction in the price of U.S. exports relative to other competitors. The commercial exploitation of the Mesabi iron ore range, for example, reduced domestic ore prices by 50% in…
Learning-by-Doing Spillovers in the Semiconductor Industry
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 generations of dynamic random access memory semiconductors over 1974-92, the authors find that learning rates average 20 percent, firms learn three times more from an additional unit of their own cumulative production than from an additional unit of anoth…
The Slide to Protectionism in the Great Depression
The Great Depression was marked by a severe outbreak of protectionist trade policies. But contrary to the presumption that all countries scrambled to raise trade barriers, there was substantial cross-country variation in the movement to protectionism. Specifically, countries that remained on the gold standard resorted to tariffs, import quotas, and exchange controls to a greater extent than countries that went off gold. Just as the gold standard …
Free Trade and Protection in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France Revisited
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
After Empires
Introduction 1. The Third World and the Creation of UNCTAD 2. The Myopia of the European Community 3. Empires and Shopping Malls 4. The Developing Countries' Most Favoured Partner 5. The Year of Oil 6. North-South Dialogues Epilogue: In the Name of Global Competition
Mercantilism as Strategic Trade Policy
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 policy. The Anglo-Dutch rivalry for the East India trade illustrates a case in which the profit-shifting motive for strategic trade policies exists. Dutch supremacy in the early East India trade was facilitated by a managerial incentive scheme in the mo…
Welfare Effects of British Free Trade
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, believed that a unilateral tariff reduction would so deteriorate British terms of trade as to outweigh efficiency gains and make the country worse off. In this paper, Britain's foreign trade elasticities are estimated for this period in a simultaneous equat…
Labor productivity in the United States and the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century
Could the United States Iron Industry Have Survived Free Trade after the Civil War
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 over 40 percent. The Democrats proposed lower tariffs to reduce customs revenue. The Republicans proposed higher tariffs to reduce imports and customs revenues. This article attempts to determine the revenue effects of the proposed changes. Given th…
The Economic Consequences of Sir Robert Peel
This paper provides a quantitative general equilibrium evaluation of the repeal of Britain's Corn Laws in 1846. Using a detailed input-output matrix of the British economy in 1841, we find the abolition of Britain's tariff on imported grain left overall welfare roughly unchanged as the static efficiency gains are offset by terms-of-trade losses. Labourers and capital owners gained a slight amount at the expense of landowners. Combining these chan…
The rise and fall of import substitution
The Midway and Beyond
Over the last decade, there has been an outpouring of scholarly research on the Chicago school of economics and its leading figures. This paper provides a selective survey of this research, focusing in particular on (1) the origins of a distinctive Chicago economics in the 1930s, (2) the work of Milton Friedman in the 1950s and 1960s in light of the Keynesian consensus of the day, and (3) the relationship between Chicago economists and the idea o…
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 import-competing producers and the costs imposed on export-oriented producers by focusing on changes in the domestic prices of traded goods relative to nontraded goods. The results suggest that the 30 percent average import tariff gave about a 17 percent impli…
"The Aftermath of Hamilton's "Report on Manufactures
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 implemented. Although Hamilton's proposals for bounties (subsidies) failed to receive support, virtually every tariff recommendation was adopted by Congress in early 1792. These tariffs were not highly protectionist because Hamilton feared discouraging imp…
Did Late-Nineteenth-Century U S. Tarriffs Promote Infant Industries? Evidence From the Tinplate Industry
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 tariff. Treating producers' entry and exit decisions as endogenous, a probability model is estimated to determine the conditions under which domestic tinplate production will occur. Counterfactual simulations indicate that, without the McKinley duties,…
Adam Smith's “tolerable administration of justice” and the Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith argues that a country’s income depends on its labor productivity, which in turn hinges on the division of labor. But why are some countries able to take advantage of the division of labor and become rich, while others fail to do so and remain poor? Smith describes how the security of property rights, through a “tolerable administration of justice,” allows investment and exchange to take place, bringing about economic progress. Recent e…
Against the Tide
Douglas Irwin
Retrospectives
The recent theoretical literature on strategic trade policy suggests that government intervention in international trade has the potential to be welfare improving. Government promotion of exports from imperfectly competitive industries, for example, may enable domestic firms to capture economic rents from foreign firms, thereby increasing national welfare. In addition, active responses to foreign protection, by a policy of reciprocity, may be req…
Trade Policy, Exchange Rates, and the Globalization Surge of the 1990s
The decision by developing countries to open up their economies to foreign trade and investment in the 1980s and 1990s was a momentous event in world history. How and why did this trade policy revolution take place? Most accounts of trade politics stress domestic interest groups or trade agreements as driving policy changes, but these explanations fail in this period. This paper notes that many import restrictions were imposed for balance of paym…
Changing the Trade and Development Consensus
Economists became skeptical about the benefits of free trade for developing countries during the Great Depression, but in the 1960s some had come to recognize the problems with import substitution policies and the benefits of encouraging exports. This article examines how four economists who led this transition-Ian Little, Jagdish Bhagwati, Anne Krueger, and Bela Balassa-came to their views and helped build a new professional consensus on trade p…
The antebellum U.S. iron industry
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 the first Congress achieved a quorum, James Madison introduced a proposal to levy duties on imported goods. This tariff proposal became one of the first pieces of legislation passed by Congress and was signed by President George Washington on 4 July 1…
Did Late Nineteenth Century U.S. Tariffs Promote Infant Industries? Evidence from the Tinplate Industry
3 Paul Using data from Turkey, Ann
Against the Tide
Journal Article Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade. By Douglas A. Irwin. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. xii, 265 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-691-01138-9.) Get access Thomas W. Zeiler Thomas W. Zeiler University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 84, Issue 3, December 1997, Pages 1050–1051, https://doi.org/10.2307/295…
Was Britain immiserized during the industrial revolution
Welfare Effects of British Free Trade
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, believed that a unilateral tariff reduction would so deteriorate British terms of trade as to outweigh efficiency gains and make the country worse off. In this paper, Britain's foreign trade elasticities are estimated for this period in a simultaneous equat…
Mercantilism as Strategic Trade Policy
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 policy. The Anglo-Dutch rivalry for the East India trade illustrates a case in which the profit-shifting motive for strategic trade policies exists. Dutch supremacy in the early East India trade was facilitated by a managerial incentive scheme in the mo…
Was Britain immiserized during the industrial revolution
Retrospectives
The recent theoretical literature on strategic trade policy suggests that government intervention in international trade has the potential to be welfare improving. Government promotion of exports from imperfectly competitive industries, for example, may enable domestic firms to capture economic rents from foreign firms, thereby increasing national welfare. In addition, active responses to foreign protection, by a policy of reciprocity, may be req…
Free Trade and Protection in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France Revisited
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Trade Politics and the Semiconductor Industry
Learning-by-Doing Spillovers in the Semiconductor Industry
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 generations of dynamic random access memory semiconductors over 1974-92, the authors find that learning rates average 20 percent, firms learn three times more from an additional unit of their own cumulative production than from an additional unit of anoth…
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 Stolper-Samuelson theorem) or along industry-lines (as implied by models with imperfect factor mobility). This paper examines voting patterns in the British general election of 1923, an election that hinged on free trade versus protection. The elect…
Against the Tide
Against the Tide
Douglas Irwin
Against the Tide
Against the Tide
Journal Article Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade. By Douglas A. Irwin. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. xii, 265 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-691-01138-9.) Get access Thomas W. Zeiler Thomas W. Zeiler University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 84, Issue 3, December 1997, Pages 1050–1051, https://doi.org/10.2307/295…
Against the Tide
About two hundred years ago, largely as a result of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, free trade achieved an intellectual status unrivaled by any other doctrine in the field of economics. What accounts for the success of free trade against then prevailing mecantilist doctrines? And how well has free trade withstood various theoretical attacks that have challenged it since Adam Smith's time? In this readable intellectual history, Douglas Irwin expla…
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff
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 itself versus other factors such as declining income or foreign retaliation? Partial and general equilibrium assessments indicate that the Smoot-Hawley tariff itself reduced imports by 4-8 percent (ceteris paribus), although the combination of specific…
Did Late Nineteenth Century U.S. Tariffs Promote Infant Industries? Evidence from the Tinplate Industry
3 Paul Using data from Turkey, Ann
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 over 40 percent. The Democrats proposed lower tariffs to reduce customs revenue. The Republicans proposed higher tariffs to reduce imports and customs revenues. This article attempts to determine the revenue effects of the proposed changes. Given th…
Did Late-Nineteenth-Century U S. Tarriffs Promote Infant Industries? Evidence From the Tinplate Industry
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 tariff. Treating producers' entry and exit decisions as endogenous, a probability model is estimated to determine the conditions under which domestic tinplate production will occur. Counterfactual simulations indicate that, without the McKinley duties,…
Could the United States Iron Industry Have Survived Free Trade after the Civil War
The two faces of globalization
Fears about economic globalization overlook the fact that the growing international division of labor can be beneficial to all participants—as may be seen in the spectacular strides that have been made recently by once‐impoverished developing countries. Free trade does threaten some, but the negative effects of international trade even on developed countries such as the United States have been vastly overstated. Western workers are rich because o…
Free Trade Today
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 fueled the expansion of iron and steel exports in part by enabling a sharp reduction in the price of U.S. exports relative to other competitors. The commercial exploitation of the Mesabi iron ore range, for example, reduced domestic ore prices by 50% in…
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 the first Congress achieved a quorum, James Madison introduced a proposal to levy duties on imported goods. This tariff proposal became one of the first pieces of legislation passed by Congress and was signed by President George Washington on 4 July 1…
"The Aftermath of Hamilton's "Report on Manufactures
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 implemented. Although Hamilton's proposals for bounties (subsidies) failed to receive support, virtually every tariff recommendation was adopted by Congress in early 1792. These tariffs were not highly protectionist because Hamilton feared discouraging imp…
Labor productivity in the United States and the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century
The Third Noel Butlin Lecture
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 force participation rate and male‐skewed gender ratio gradually aligned with other countries. A similar reversion occurred in the other important components underlying Australia's high productivity, such as work hours. As the structure of the economy shi…
Economics (38 obras) · International trade (25 obras) · International economics (20 obras) · Political science (20 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Global trade and economics (13 obras) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (13 obras) · Market economy (13 obras) · Tariff (13 obras) · Free trade (11 obras)