Books reviewed: Paul C. Cheshire and Edwin S. Mills (eds.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, Vol. 3: Applied Urban Economics Donald G. Janelle and David C. Hodge (eds.), Information, Place, and Cyberspace: Issues in Accessibility Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception Office...

Adam Smith’s view of the proper role for government in commercial societies remains a source of debate. Here we sketch out in simple game-theoretic terms the numerous public-goods provision and externalities problems on display in particular in Book V of The Wealth of Nations. Casting these...

A moment of consequence to the postbellum U.S. tariff debate was the 'conversion' of David Ames Wells, Commissioner of the Revenue from 1865- 1870, to free trade. When he began his work Wells was a disciple of the eminent American protectionist Henry C. Carey. By the age of forty, however, he...

Durante buena parte de la era previa a la globalización, desde la década de 1860 hasta la I Guerra Mundial, Estados Unidos mantuvo aranceles sorprendentemente elevados. Los historiadores que se ocupan del tema económico actual han sugerido que el proteccionismo de EE. UU. fue producto de una...

The first chairman of the U.S. Tariff Commission, Frank W. Taussig, expected the new body to put an end to "haphazard" and "irresponsible" management of trade policy. Reforming trade agreements was a top priority. In 1922, acting on the Commission's weighty report, iReciprocity and Commercial...

The religious awakening of the early-nineteenth-century United States opened deep rifts in the generation that overlapped and followed it. The rifts emerged from questions of religious doctrine and evangelical method, then widened to encompass worldly politics and ideologies, including the...

Several varieties of bilateral trade arrangements were tried in the United States from independence to 1909. They included most-favored-nation (MFN) treaties of the conditional and unconditional varieties, MFN treaties in which the conditionality was implicit, preferential trade arrangements,...

Condy Raguet (1784-1842) was the first Charg%E9 d'Affaires from the United States to Brazil and a conspicuous author of political economy from the 1820s to the early 1840s. He contributed to the era's free-trade doctrine as editor of influential periodicals, most notably The Banner of the...