Question

write a summary about the The Trade-Offs on Tariffs and International Trade, with Professor Douglas Irwin ( the audio)

Answer 1

• Douglas Irwin is the John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. He is the author of a number of books, including the definitive history of American trade policy, Clashing over Commerce .
• In this sheltering-at-home edition of Uncommon Knowledge, we delve deep into the issues around the Trump administration’s imposition of huge tariffs on goods from China and elsewhere, and the impact of a health crisis that has businesses across the country re-examining their investments abroad. We get deep into the weeds of the issues around imports and exports with Professor Irwin.
• But Irwin doesn't begin where Taussig left off. He starts in colonial times to make certain his readers understand not only that U.S. trade policy played a major role in shaping the course of U.S. history, but that the mercantilist trade policies of the British Empire—such as the Navigation Acts, which precluded direct trade between the American colonies and other countries and required all goods be channeled through England-contributed to the growing anti.Crown fervor that eventually erupted into revolution and the birth of a nation.
• Irwin argues that U.S. trade policy substantively changed course only twice in our history, both times in response to exogenous shocks which led to political realignment—the Civil War and the Great Depression. Within each of the three periods delineated by these two shocks, policy continuity largely prevailed. But the shocks themselves heralded wholesale changes in the objectives of U.S. trade policy. In Irwin's shorthand, the objectives of the three periods, chronologically, were "revenue, restriction, and reciprocity.”