The New Protectionism and Negative Engineering

Dynamic markets produce innovation. Financial markets have innovated around regulation, internet content providers innovate around censorship, and now we are seeing the political marketplace drive innovations to get around constraints on protectionism. Following the global experience of the 1930s, the post-War multilateral system has been surprisingly successful at driving a process of collective tariff reductions and restrictions on backsliding through treaty-bound bindings on tariff increases. Political safety valves (antidumping, countervailing duties, etc) greased the wheels that keep this negotiating machinery moving forward.     Adam Smith would not have been surprised by the result: falling trade costs and generally rising trade, innovation, and prosperity.

Figure 1b: Trade cost indices, 1921-1939 (1921=100) [1]



While the system has targeted tariffs, it has been less successful at limiting export subsidies, procurement preferences, exchange rate manipulation, and production and R&D subsidies. With the rise of multinationals and the globalization of service firms, which rely on mobility of information and workers, the global market for goods and services has also moved into regions largely unregulated by the multilateral system.

Not surprisingly, in the current economic crisis, the political market place is innovating, selling protection through channels not tightly regulated by the global and regional bindings on import tariffs that are at the core of the NAFTA, WTO, and European Economic Area. Instead of tariffs, governments are moving to provide tax breaks, subsidies, procurement preferences, and the like. They are also under pressure to limit the ability of global firms to operate on the global labor market, in the belief that this will weaken the bargaining position of business vis-a-vis local workers. We are witnessing a new protectionism: less transparent, couched in resurgent xenophobic rhetoric, and outside the mechanisms regulated by international treaties.

Some musings on what have we seen in the past weeks:

Strikes in Britain over foreign workers: Technically, the United Kingdom is a member of the European Union. This means that British goods and services have free access to European markets, and vice-versa. This also means British workers must compete with European workers, but are also allowed to compete on the broader European labor market. This past week British labor unions have called strikes to protest Italian workers in Britain. This is where the political class should be cold and clinical, and try to calm emotions with facts. According to estimates published by the OECD (2008), there are roughly 28 thousand British workers in Italy, and 57 thousand Italian born workers in Britain. The bigger picture though is one of millions of Brits working abroad, and millions of OECD-born workers in Britain. On net, from these same data, there are roughly 100,000 more British born workers elsewhere in the OECD than there are OECD-born workers in Britain: 2.66 million workers from the OECD in Britain; and 2.76 British workers in other OECD countries. Segmenting labor markets geographically is not the answer to the crisis. Otherwise, perhaps the English should be banned from working in Scotland, workers in Glasgow should be prohibited from working in Belfast, and the 3 millions Brits working overseas in the OECD should be sent home? This would be a sad day for British pubs abroad, but a great one for the competing Irish pubs. Hopefully, obligations in various treaties governing the European Union will preclude truly stupid actions by leaders tempted to act irresponsibly. [2,3]

Buy America: After years of pressing foreign governments to give improved access conditions to U.S. suppliers (reflected in The plurilateral Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) in the WTO), the U.S. Congress is now turning a general economic stimulus package into a vehicle for subsidies through "Buy America" provisions, where contracts involving U.S. funds would be forced to buy from U.S. suppliers. Of course, what's good for the goose if good for the gander, and such a move will quickly lock U.S. multinationals out of foreign contracts as there will be no moral high ground left for the U.S. Trade Representative to stand on. If the U.S. wants a level playing field when selling Caterpillar equipment, Boeing planes, and engineering expertise on foreign projects, this is a really bad idea. [4]

Agricultural export subsidies: OECD Members have spent over a decade on negotiations and economic research (through the OECD Secretariat) to move towards a rational set of farm policies that benefits tax payers and does not punish low income producers. So what are they now doing? The EU has resumed farm export subsidy payments. Operationally, they are exporting the impact of low prices onto the rest of the world. This means they are moving back to policies that cost the tax payer money and punish producers in low income countries. [5]

This is the time for responsible political dialog on managing a global crisis. Cutting the world economy into pieces does not seem a logical step in this direction. We risk building what Bastiat called a negative railroad.  Extending this metaphor, we should call the builders of the new protectionism what they are: negative engineers, building new systems to destroy jobs and prosperity. [6]

Notes:


[1] The figure is from "Globalisation and the costs of international trade from 1870 to the present," David Jacks, Christopher M. Meissner, and Dennis Novy, VoxEU, 16 August 2008.


[2] Foreign labour row deal rejected, BBC news, Wednesday, 4 February 2009.


[3] Database on Immigrants in OECD countries (DIOC), OECD 2008.


[4] Will US stimulus trigger a trade war?, BBC news, Wednesday, 4 February 2009.


[5] EU Dairy Export Subsidy Measures Requires U.S. Response, Cattle network 1/16/2009 9:11:00 AM .


[6] The Negative Railroad

M. Simiot raises the following question:

"Should there be a break in the tracks at Bordeaux on the railroad from Paris to Spain?"

He answers the question in the affirmative and offers a number of reasons, of which I propose to examine only this:

"There should be a break in the railroad from Paris to Bayonne at Bordeaux; for, if goods and passengers are forced to stop at that city, this will be profitable for boatmen, porters, owners of hotels, etc."

Here again we see clearly how the interests of those who perform services are given priority over the interests of the consumers.

But if Bordeaux has a right to profit from a break in the tracks, and if this profit is consistent with the public interest, then Angoulême, Poitiers, Tours, Orléans, and, in fact, all the intermediate points, including Ruffec, Châtellerault, etc., etc., ought also to demand breaks in the tracks, on the ground of the general interest—in the interest, that is, of domestic industry—for the more there are of these breaks in the line, the greater will be the amount paid for storage, porters, and cartage at every point along the way. By this means, we shall end by having a railroad composed of a whole series of breaks in the tracks, i.e., a negative railroad.

Whatever the protectionists may say, it is no less certain that the basic principle of restriction is the same as the basic principle of breaks in the tracks: the sacrifice of the consumer to the producer, of the end to the means.

Frédéric Bastiat
Economic Sophisms: First Series, Chapter 17
A Negative Railroad
I.17.3-I.17.19