tariffs though they continued to give some preference to imports from Britain
(Bairoch and Kozul-Wright, 1996). In the US the 1816 tariff law imposed an
average tariff of 35 per cent on almost all manufactured goods, in particular
cotton, woollen and iron goods, which were raised again in 1824 and 1864. US
tariffs on manufactured goods averaged about 45 per cent in 1875 and 44 per
cent in 1913 which was one of the highest average rates in the world (Bairoch
and Kozul-Wright, 1996:8; Chang, 2002, 2003). This alternative view shows
that rising trade ratios were related to deliberate policies to promote the
production and subsequent export of manufactured goods rather than to open-
ing up to free competition from imports.
In the contemporary global economy it is a longstanding criticism of devel-
oped countries that their trade tariffs and subsidies undermine exports from
developing countries. The highest tariffs in the US are commonly those on
imports of labour-intensive manufactured goods, especially textiles and cloth-
ing. The average European cow receives a subsidy of $2 a day while more than
half the people in the developing world live on less than that. OECD figures
show that total assistance to rich-country farmers was $311 billion in 2001,
which was then six times greater than all development assistance and greater
than the GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa. Evidence of the impact of developed-
country subsidies comes from patterns of trade displacement. Sub-Saharan
African market shares of oil seeds,ve getable oils, groundnuts, kernels and
palm oil steadily declined after independence. The biggest source of displace-
ment from the 1960s through to the 1990s was not other developing countries
but a highly subsidised OECD agriculture (Ng and Yeats, 1997). In the early
2000s the US and EU accounted for around half of all world wheat exports
with prices 46 per cent and 34 per cent below costs of production. The EU is
the world’s largest exporter of skimmed milk powder, provided at half the costs
of production,and also the largest exporter of white sugar, provided at quarter
of the costs of production (Wolf, 2004). In Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali
and Togo cotton production amounts to a significant proportion of GDP and a
large share of agricultural earnings. In Mali cotton production in 2000–01 was
9 per cent of GDP and 38 per cent of merchandise exports and in Benin 5.3 per
cent of GDP and 66 per cent of merchandise exports. At the same time in the
US, 25,000 cotton farmers shared $3–4 billion in subsidies with a quarter of
this total going to 30,000 large farms (Sachs et al., 2004).
Other research casts doubt on the argument that the key reasons for poor
African export performance are the policy decisions of developed countries.
The pattern of protection cannot explain the failures of African countries rela-
tive to other developing countries. UNCTAD statistics on OECD trade barriers
between the early 1960s and early 1990s show that Sub-Saharan Africa faced
lower tariffs on exports to Japan, US and EU than the average of all developing
countries. Tariffs on Zambian exports to the EU were 2.9 per cent lower than
the developing-country average, while those for Taiwan were 4.0 per cent and
South Korea 4.2 per cent higher than the average. Non-tariff barriers covered an
av erage of 11 per cent of Africa’s non-fuel exports compared with an average
International Trade, Openness and Integration 273