35323
The Political Economy
of Nontariff Barriers:
A Cross-national Analysis
EDWARD D.MANSFIELD
AND MARC L.BUSCHSince the 1970s, nontariff barriers (NTBs) have emerged as one
of the primary impediments to international trade. As tariffs were
negotiated away over the successive rounds of the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, previous NTBs were exposed
and new NTBs were created to insulate uncompetitive industries
from the consequences of liberalization. In this essay, Edward
Mansfield and Marc Busch synthesize domestic societal and
domestic institutional arguments and find that NTBs are most
pervasive when deteriorating macroeconomic conditions prompt
industries to make new demands for protection, when countries
are sufficiently large to give policymakers incentives to impose
protection, and when domestic institutions permit groups to
influence policymakers. In short, NTBs appear to be most
pervasive in cases where the incentives of pressure groups and
policymakers converge.Much research on the determinants of trade policy has focused on the efficacy
of societal and statist approaches. Societal theories typically attribute patterns
of protection to variations in demands made by pressure groups, whereas statist
theories emphasize the effects of the “national interest” and domestic institutions
in determining the level of protection. While both approaches have gained
considerable currency, debates concerning their relative merits have been heated
and longstanding. Yet very little quantitative evidence has been brought to bear
on this topic.
In this article, we provide some of the first results of this sort. Our findings
indicate that although societal and statist approaches often are considered mutually
exclusive, it is more fruitful to view them as complementary. Moreover, the
interaction between factors that give rise to demands for protection and those that
regulate the provision of protection by policymakers has not been treated adequately
in the literature on foreign economic policy. This gap in the literature is
fundamentally important, since our results indicate that the interaction between