Measuring the overall restrictiveness of a country's international trade policies is important and, in fact, essential for estimating the effects of trade policies and for negotiations to reduce trade barriers. A good measure is also difficult to produce: Trade restrictiveness indices are...

The authors investigate several existing political economy hypotheses on trade policy using cross-country trade-protection data for non-agricultural goods. The authors find that a left-leaning political regime leads to pro-labor trade policies only for a subset of trade policy measures. In...