Tuesday, 28 August 2018

Protectionism and the business cycle

a column by Alessandro Barattieri, Matteo Cacciatore and Fabio Ghironi for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

Populist politicians argue that protectionism stimulates the domestic economy. This column uses data on temporary trade barriers from antidumping investigations to show that when small open economies have imposed protectionist measures, it has caused inflation to rise and real economic activity to fall. Empirical analysis and model-based exercises show that protectionism is costly even when used temporarily, even for economies stuck in liquidity traps, and regardless of the flexibility of the exchange rate.

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