This research estimates the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on import protection policies over 1988:Q1-2010:Q4 for the United States, European Union, and three other industrialized economies. First, estimates on a pre-Great Recession sample provide evidence of three key relationships for...

Do exports resume when import-restricting temporary trade barriers such as antidumping are finally removed? To establish the importance of this question for emerging economies, this paper uses newly available data from the World Bank's Temporary Trade Barriers Database to update a number of...

While the original justification of the antidumping laws in the industrial economies was to protect domestic consumers against predation by foreign suppliers, by the early 1990s the laws and their use had evolved so much that the opposite concern arose. Rather than attacking anti-competitive...

This paper estimates the impact of aggregate fluctuations on the time-varying trade policies of 13 major emerging economies over 1989-2010. By 2010, these World Trade Organization member countries collectively accounted for 21 percent of world merchandise imports and 22 percent of world gross...

Trade policy commitments to lower import tariffs and to maintain tariffs at low levels entail short and long-run political-economic costs and benefits. Empirical work examining the relationship between such commitments and the exercise of trade policy flexibilities is still relatively nascent,...

Use of temporary trade barriers has proliferated across countries, industries, and even policy instruments. This paper constructs a panel of bilateral, product-level United States steel imports that are matched to a unique data set on trade policy exclusions that are associated with the 2002...

Two of the most important trade policy developments to take place since the 1980s are the expansion of preferential trade agreements and temporary trade barriers, such as antidumping, safeguards, and countervailing duties. Despite the empirical importance of preferential trade agreements and...

There is not yet consensus in the trade agreements literature as to whether preferential liberalization leads to more or less multilateral liberalization. However, research thus far has focused mostly on tariff measures of import protection. This paper develops more comprehensive measures of...

How high were import tariffs when GATT participants began negotiations to reduce them in 1947? Establishing this starting point is key to determining how successful the GATT has been in bringing down trade barriers. If the average tariff level was about 40 percent, as commonly reported, the...

This paper surveys empirically the broad features of trade policy in goods for 31 major economies that collectively represented 83 percent of the world's population and 91 percent of the world's GDP in 2013. It addresses the following five questions: Do some countries have more liberal trading...