Review 5: Trade Protection in the United States, by Charles K. Rowley, Willem Thorbecke & Richard E. Wagner (1995)

Howard J. Wall,
The Economic Journal, (January 1997)

"This book sets out to present an analysis of US trade policy using the tools of the 'Virginia School' of public choice theory advanced by Buchanan and Tullock. In the first section, the authors make their case for free trade, mixing standard trade theory with the Virginia School's view of a minimalist government. Because standard trade theory provides a powerful and nearly comprehensive case for free trade, readers familiar with it will likely find the addition of the Virginia School approach to be overkill. More worrying, those readers who are not sympathetic with the Virginia School will be in danger of recoiling from its excesses, and may overlook the power of the standard models, which they would otherwise find convincing. Nevertheless, the middle two sections of the book provide a useful compendium of the politics of trade protection, and examine the roles of the various players in the US political process. The authors outline the institutional behaviour of the legislative branch, the executive branch and the bureaucracy towards trade policy. They then present detailed discussions of the roles that each of these institutions have played in the formulation of actual policies. These sections are a good supplement to the standard international trade literature, which only recently had begun to formalise the political process underlying tariff setting, and is often short on specific examples of process. In short, I find this book to be a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of the endogeneity of trade policy. However, I am not convinced that it will convert many to the cause of free trade who are not already convinced by standard theory, or by a belief in a minimalist government."