Protectionism

A leading international economist looks at many of the key issues of trade policy now confronting the United States and the world in this timely book. Clear, informative, and witty, Jagdish Bhagwati provides the best available analysis of the protection debate and offers a prescription for reform in this turbulent area of trade policy. Bhagwati identifies new and powerful interests and ideologies that are likely to dominate the outcome of the debate. He argues that opposing tendencies can be identified in trade-related ideologies and in the national and sectional interests that lobby on trade policy in pluralistic societies. He offers the prognosis that the forces favoring freer trade are more robust and more fundamental than the forces of protectionism, and that pro trade forces are likely to triumph in the end but only if we adapt appropriately the institutions within which these ideologies and interests must function. Through an appealing combination of text, quotations, cartoons, tables, charts, and graphs, Bhagwati provides a masterly and entertaining look at the forces for and against protection.

Protectionism is based on the inaugural series of Ohlin Lectures, which he delivered at the Stockholm School of Economics in October of 1987.