This paper is a short, non-technical exposition of the political economy of protection. It asks how do political forces operate to generate protection, and what determines the magnitude and form that protection takes.

In this paper we ask how to construct a tariff or quota schedule which depends on the behavior of a domestic monopsonistic monopolist in order to achieve the best tradeoff between two objectives of a government. We consider various political and economic tradeoffs which could face the policy...