Edward D.Mansfield and Marc L.Busch 365the “state-society” literature that has been the topic of much heated controversy
among scholars of foreign economic policy. Our findings indicate that these debates
have been miscast. Rather than viewing protection as an outcome whereby pressure
groups run roughshod over public officials who are inherently liberal with respect
to trade, NTBs are greatest when the interests of state and societal actors converge.
Similarly, much of the recent disagreement among analysts of foreign economic
policy has centered on whether societal demands for protection or domestic
institutions that regulate the provision of protection should be emphasized. This
debate has served to create a false dichotomy. The issue is not which factor should
be emphasized, since both are centrally important determinants of NTBs. Rather,
the central issue is how to integrate both factors in a comprehensive manner.
Although it is obvious that our results should be taken as tentative, their strength
is striking. These findings strongly indicate that it would be fruitful to further
integrate societal models—especially models of endogenous protection—and statist
models, and that this research strategy is likely to generate new and important
insights concerning the determinants of trade policy.
Finally, our results yield substantial evidence that tariffs are strongly related to
the incidence of NTBs, and that these forms of protection are substitutes. This
finding is consistent with the law of constant protection. Among the states considered
here, new tariffs could not easily have been imposed due to GATT restrictions.
States with low tariff levels that wish to augment their trade barriers therefore
have had reason to rely on NTBs for this purpose. Further, states characterized by
high tariff levels are likely to be sufficiently well-protected that they need not
supplement tariffs with NTBs. Our findings suggest the possibility that many of
the tariff reductions made by the GATT during the Tokyo Round may not have
had the intended effect of reducing protection. Instead, these cuts seem to have
produced countervailing increases in the incidence of NTBs....
NOTES
- Ronald Rogowski, “Trade and the Variety of Democratic Institutions,” International
Organization 41 (Spring 1987), p. 200. - Rogowski, “Trade and the Variety of Democratic Institutions,” p. 209.
- Sam Laird and Alexander Yeats, Quantitative Methods for Trade-Barrier Analysis (New
York: New York University Press, 1990), p. 90.