What makes a country reach for a tariff when it has promised not to?
Self-Enforcing Trade Agreements: Evidence from Time-Varying Trade Policy
Chad P. Bown, Meredith A. Crowley (2013) · American Economic Review 103(2)
Article ↗ · Replication data ↗ (openICPSR)
The archive requires an account we do not hold, so the files were not opened. What follows rests on the published abstract and on this platform's own observations.
What the authors found
Bagwell and Staiger's theory of cooperative trade agreements predicts that new protection rises with imports, rises when import demand and export supply are inelastic, and falls when imports are volatile. Bown and Crowley test this against US antidumping actions from 1997 to 2006 and find it holds: a one standard deviation rise in import growth raises the probability of an antidumping tariff by 35 per cent, while a one standard deviation rise in import volatility lowers it by 76 per cent.
What our data adds
The theory's first prediction — protection follows import surges — is testable in principle against the bilateral series here, and the trade-war years supply the obvious case: US imports from China peaked at 563 billion dollars in 2018, the year the tariffs landed. But that is one observation dressed as a pattern, and the paper's result rests on hundreds of product-level actions. This database holds no record of trade remedies at all: no antidumping cases, no countervailing duties, no safeguard actions.
| Figure | Value | Indicator |
|---|---|---|
| US imports from China at the 2018 peak | 563bn USD | IMTS.MG_CIF_USD.A |
| Trade remedy cases in this database | none | IMTS.MG_CIF_USD.A |
Every figure here is computed from observations in this database and can be charted, downloaded or queried.
What this cannot show
Trade remedies are a document shape rather than a series — a case has parties, a date, a product scope and an outcome, none of which fits an observation table keyed on indicator, area, partner and period. The Global Trade Alert database is recorded in this platform's source register as exactly this kind of missing shape. Until something of that form is loaded, notes like this one can describe the finding but not go near it.
The data behind it
Related notes
- When a country exports, how much of the value was actually made there — and how far does the usual export statistic mislead us?
- Who actually paid for the 2018 US tariffs, and what did they do to the pattern of trade?
- When two countries trade with each other and neither is the United States, whose currency is the price in?