Rocks, hard places, and the new protectionism: textile trade policy choices in the United States and Japan

Abstract

Why have advanced industrial countries responded with different types of protectionist policy to postwar international competition and the resulting societal pressure for state action? In contrast to the across-the-board tariff wars of the 1930s, postwar protectionism is a patchwork of tariffs, unilateral and nonunilateral quotas, administrative restrictions, state subsidies, and production cartels. Arguments based on international economic structure, international regimes, statist approaches, and domestic structure all appear to have difficulty in accounting for divergent trade policy choices. This article introduces a more nuanced identification and integration of the international and domestic sources of the new protectionism. An examination of textile trade policy in the United States and Japan reveals that when state policymakers face conflicting international constraints and domestic pressure over the use of overt types of protectionist policy, the greater the domestic pressure, the more overt the policy response.