The Economics and Politics of Administered Protection: An Analysis of the Japanese Safeguard System for Agricultural Goods

This paper models the lobbying activity concerning a safeguard measure and applies it to the empirical analysis to see if the monitoring system on a safeguard measure is administered along with the WTO agreement or affected by political factors. The model analysis describes that there exists a potential mechanism that a rise in imports induces a political activity by producers. The empirical analysis shows that the monitoring system on a safeguard measure is not so neutral to the WTO conditions and it is more or less influenced by the political factors.