Suadat hussain Wani 's answer represents a typical mode of thinking in this topic. Although he is observing facts correctly, he states contradictory claims perhaps without noticing it (He claims barriers are bad for the welfare of people, but he claims at the same time that the barriers are good for job creation.).

This signifies that (1) we lack a good framework to analyze various aspects of trade restriction and liberalization, and (2) opinions about trade policies represent intuitive ideas rather than analyzed and empirically tested results. The lack of suitable framework produces one-sided policy recommendations based on more ideological thoughts than a cool analysis of the effects of policies.

To change this state of the art, it is necessary to obtain a new theory in place of traditional trade theories. The most popular trade theory is Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson theory. Models of this theory assume full employment by assumption and cannot as a consequence analyze the troubles like unemployment and industrial declines. Other trade theories are not exempt of this defect. Many trade-theorists have a strong pro-trade bias and argue for the unconditional trade liberalization without being aware of the problems that their theory structure imposes. They are slaves of economic theory just as John Maynard Keynes warned at the end of his famous book: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

If unemployment and job creation are the most important question, the new trade theory must be one that permits unemployment as normal state of the economy and gives a framework by which we can analyze how employment is regulated, and how jobs are created. So the good trade theory must be able to analyze losses from trade as well as gains from trade.

Although there is no such ideal trade theory, the new theory of international values is the most promising one, because it is a framework which can explain gains from trade but can also analyze unemployment. For example, it can show that trade liberalization with no coordinated effective demand policy leads to engender unemployment at least in some countries (See Theorem 4.3, Shiozawa 2017 The New Theory of International Values/ An Overview, Chapter 1, The New Construction of Ricardian Theory of International Trade). The new theory is also a framework which is compatible with the principle of effective demands. (See our new book which will be published soon: Shiozawa, Morioka and Taniguchi 2019 The Microfoundations of Evolutionary Economics.)

As this is rather a new theory, the analysis of job or industry creation is yet a blank, but it has a good possibility to be combined with evolutionary economics and provides a theoretical framework to analyze such topics as job loss, international competitiveness, and catching-up. For an example, see my chapter with Fujimoto: The Nature of International Competition among Firms (Chapter 2 in Fujimoto and Ikuine 2018 Industrial Competitiveness and Design Evolution). Classical infant industry theory may obtain a justification by the new theory.

Although increased trade barriers may lead to a downturn of global economy, as Yeboah Evans points it, we should think why such a political backlash like Trumpism emerged. We should not pursue prosperity by a heavy sacrifice of some nations. We should find a solution which permits further prosperity without further suffering of some categories of people. The first step in search of such solution is to find a good theory by which to consider trade policies and their consequences.

The Smoot-Hawley Act of the 1930 showed that tariff barrier was not a good method for the US. Other countries retaliated, which worsen the Great Depression. It appears that barriers have favoured some Small and Medium Size Economies (SME) until now, when the US is now taking measures against them. I agree with the textbook answer that some measure of protection is necessary for infant industries in the early stages of their growth cycle.

I am aware also of the argument advanced by Professor Bhagwati in his book-- Bhagwati, Jagdish, Termites in the Trading system: How Preferential Agreements Undermine Free Trade, (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2008)-- that free trade areas (FTAs) and customs unions (CUs), including Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs), do not represent free trade but preferential trade agreements (PTAs), which can affect growth.

Barriers to trade are always bad for the welfare of people.. if we think of welfare of people all around the world then barriers to trade are never an good option, but if we think of our country then sometimes barriers are good for job creation in the nation.

I just pointed out the barriers of international trade such as

1.Cultural barriers( Religin, language, customs, etc)

2.Quota

3. tarrif

4. Embargo

5. VER

6. Environmental barriers

7.Setting Standards & regulations on product & services of exporting countries.

We need to look at the basic economics and trade policies. Countries should focus on the areas of efficiency, produce more of what is most efficient for them and trade - export. Exports enlarge their markets.

In return they will buy products which they do not have advantage - or efficiency - producing. Good trade policies in any country should encourage this dynamic. Trade barriers may protect some target industries but are not the answer here. If we all want to become an autarky we will have to put up with a lot of bad products.

I would rather the French or Californians (along with a number of other countries which have wineries) produce wine and Germans or Japanese produce cars... Obviously the lines are much more blurred now, but the main concept still holds.

Trade tariffs are for domestic political consumption. We can look at eh period of global protectionism post WWI where global trade contracted as the result of protectionist actions....

Imposing tariffs are sometimes for countries own interest and wellbeing as to control import and export of certain products. However, trade wars would be good for countries who feels it will help them to establish trade policies for both exporting and importing countries in order for them to benefit equally and not one having advantage over the other. It can only lead to a decline in economic growth of the affected country and a benefit to the country imposing the tariffs to reduce trade deficit.

An increased in international trade barriers in many countries can lead to a downturn in the global economy because both the manufacturing economies and importing countries will be affected .

Trade « barriers » were usually set to protect domestic production from external competitors, at the cost of consumers ‘ welfare.

A more recent trend, at least in the developped countries, was to raise non-tariff measures to protect consumers and environment (e.g., by having food safety standards). Protecting consumers remains the main objective of EU commission, for example. Even at the cost of its own industry (e.g, automobile, rail transportation, etc.)

2018 and the bilateral China-US trade conflict maysignal a return to protecting domestic producers.

International trade has wider contributions in the transition of any economy. Today tariffs have been substantially liberalized at the international level but the cross- border trade is still not free. Increasing benefits of trade through different trade reforms and free trade agreements have diminished practicing protectionism to a higher extent. But when the issue is dealt in detail, experiences of developing and least- developed countries show a different picture. Many developed countries have become highly reluctant to use of trade restrictive measures against each other which is detrimental and reduces economic efficiency of the partner country. No doubt, they violate the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules which raise questions over ones’ own trade liberalization policies. Developed countries gets most advantages out of trade barriers as they only set the global trade policies as well as ‘standards’ and impose on other countries. Thus, various instances of trade violations remain a serious concern today. And, this has been exaggerated by the intensive use of non- tariff barriers (NTBs) or non- tariff measures (NTMs). Long back, Walter (1971) in The American Economic Review had also argued that advanced countries significantly imposed NTBs/ NTMs on developing countries.

Generally, in a free market economy tariff imposition, and quota are negative for international trade. Of late IMF and the World Bank are cautioning that World GDP will have slower growth rate in the coming year 2019 & 2020 and have cited tariff imposition by a very big economy as one of the main reason.

Suadat hussain Wani 's answer represents a typical mode of thinking in this topic. Although he is observing facts correctly, he states contradictory claims perhaps without noticing it (He claims barriers are bad for the welfare of people, but he claims at the same time that the barriers are good for job creation.).

This signifies that (1) we lack a good framework to analyze various aspects of trade restriction and liberalization, and (2) opinions about trade policies represent intuitive ideas rather than analyzed and empirically tested results. The lack of suitable framework produces one-sided policy recommendations based on more ideological thoughts than a cool analysis of the effects of policies.

To change this state of the art, it is necessary to obtain a new theory in place of traditional trade theories. The most popular trade theory is Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson theory. Models of this theory assume full employment by assumption and cannot as a consequence analyze the troubles like unemployment and industrial declines. Other trade theories are not exempt of this defect. Many trade-theorists have a strong pro-trade bias and argue for the unconditional trade liberalization without being aware of the problems that their theory structure imposes. They are slaves of economic theory just as John Maynard Keynes warned at the end of his famous book: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

If unemployment and job creation are the most important question, the new trade theory must be one that permits unemployment as normal state of the economy and gives a framework by which we can analyze how employment is regulated, and how jobs are created. So the good trade theory must be able to analyze losses from trade as well as gains from trade.

Although there is no such ideal trade theory, the new theory of international values is the most promising one, because it is a framework which can explain gains from trade but can also analyze unemployment. For example, it can show that trade liberalization with no coordinated effective demand policy leads to engender unemployment at least in some countries (See Theorem 4.3, Shiozawa 2017 The New Theory of International Values/ An Overview, Chapter 1, The New Construction of Ricardian Theory of International Trade). The new theory is also a framework which is compatible with the principle of effective demands. (See our new book which will be published soon: Shiozawa, Morioka and Taniguchi 2019 The Microfoundations of Evolutionary Economics.)

As this is rather a new theory, the analysis of job or industry creation is yet a blank, but it has a good possibility to be combined with evolutionary economics and provides a theoretical framework to analyze such topics as job loss, international competitiveness, and catching-up. For an example, see my chapter with Fujimoto: The Nature of International Competition among Firms (Chapter 2 in Fujimoto and Ikuine 2018 Industrial Competitiveness and Design Evolution). Classical infant industry theory may obtain a justification by the new theory.

Although increased trade barriers may lead to a downturn of global economy, as Yeboah Evans points it, we should think why such a political backlash like Trumpism emerged. We should not pursue prosperity by a heavy sacrifice of some nations. We should find a solution which permits further prosperity without further suffering of some categories of people. The first step in search of such solution is to find a good theory by which to consider trade policies and their consequences.

In addition to Yoshinori Shiozawa but on a much less ambitious level of research: the relationship between tariffs duties and welfare may also have to be analysed from the particular viewpoint of a given country's ability to administer its tax policy.

The trade economists' message when trade policy is concerned is that (i) overall, trade is welfare enhancing, (ii) there are winners and losers, and (iii) it is the job of national governments to compensate the losers through an adequate tax and public spending policy. (It is not only a trade issue: the same could be said about technical innovations and development: technical progress is welfare enhancing but there are winners and losers).

About trade, this is in particular what would say the WTO: trade policy is an issue of multilateral governance, social policy is a domestic matter.

The practical issue is that administering an efficient tax and redistribution policy is confronted to many obstacles, some of political nature and others related to poor administrative capacity.

Progressive income taxes on the winners and direct transfers to the losers face political economy obstacles. There is a debate about the efficient level of marginal tax, which must be high enough to cover the collection costs and finance the social transfer, but low enough to maintain the incentive to work, invest and innovate.

On indirect taxation, it happens that custom duties are very easy to collect and do not require a well developed tax administration: a few offices in some key points of entry are sufficient. Historically, they were the first taxes regularly collected by the government (be they kings at the entry of the kingdom, or local barons at the entry of their village).

Value-Added Taxes, which are much more efficient from an economic perspective, do require a well developed tax administration covering all the country. Many developing countries are far from being able to put in place an efficient tax system and remain dependent on the custom duties levelled at the border.

Perhaps the WTO should create a technical assistance program to help lesser developed countries to reinforce their internal tax system when they lower their tariff duties?

Like any conflict, trade conflicts should be targeted with a clear set of achievable goals in mind and experienced trade diplomacists who understand how to move among conflict and cooperation to achieve outcomes. People best suited to manage a trade conflict and resolve it optimally are skilled at conflict resolution.

In the context of the above considerations, I also propose the following research problem:

In what situations can trade wars lead some of the smaller national economies to an economic crisis?

Trade wars can lead to a decline in revenues in the state budget if the country developed exports and obtained high income from the state budget. In this situation, trade wars can lead to a public finance crisis if the state budget has a high budget deficit and public finances are burdened with high public debt. In this situation there is a systemic risk of increasing indebtedness and loss of liquidity in the state finances. This type of situation can lead to an economic crisis.

Do you agree with me on the above matter?

In the context of the above issues, I am asking you the following question:

In what situations can trade wars lead some of the smaller national economies to an economic crisis?

Please reply

I invite you to the discussion

Thank you very much

Best wishes

In addition, I propose the following research question in this area:

What generates high systemic risk of imbalances in the trade balance?

In my opinion, liberalization of trade does not always lead to deterioration of the trade balance because there are many determinants that affect the balance of trade. Many of these determinants are not always correlated with the pace of economic development of the country.

Some of the factors affecting the development of international trade are related to the specificity of the structure of the national economy of a given country and the dominant production factors on the basis of which a specific country builds its comparative advantage and develops exports.

In my opinion, the liberalization of international trade should, in accordance with the neoclassical economy, positively influence the economic development of all or most of the countries taking part in over-national trade.

Another issue may be the liberalization of flows of financial capital, mainly speculative capital, which are managed by national banks and investment funds. It happened that the speculative transactions carried out by such large financial institutions on the financial markets of other relatively smaller economies resulted in currency and financial crises in those countries.

Do you agree with me on the above matter?

In the context of the above issues, I am asking you the following question:

What generates high systemic risk of imbalances in the trade balance?

Please reply

I invite you to the discussion

Thank you very much

Best wishes

For there to be no barriers to international trade, non-interference in the internal affairs of any state should be real, and exchanges are equivalent.

Interesting discussion

The Reduction of trade Barriers should lead to win-win situations...

In the WTO World all Barriers to trade are undesirable, either duties or non-tariff-barriers...

The new WTO-Agreement in trade facilitation (TFA) aims at the further reduction of any trade Barriers and costs, etc.

143 WTO member states have signed that TFA as of June 2019...

Dear Friends and Colleagues of RG,

Are current trade wars a classic example of deliberately introducing additional barriers to the development of international trade? Do these introduced, for example, anti-dumping tariffs significantly limit the development of international trade, over the national flow of production factors, including financial capital? Is it possible to generate a significant slowdown in the global economy's economic growth in this way?

Please reply

I invite you to the discussion

Thank you very much

Best wishes

Dear Dariusz Prokopowicz : If you refer to the on-going China-USA trade conflict, I suspect it is not fully accurate to analyse it as a traditional protectionist policy move, at least from the US point of view.

The US objective, at the contrary, is to have more open access to Chinese market (services) or less constrained conditions for direct investment (e.g., removing the pre-conditions on patents licencing and technological transfer).

It should therefore be analysed from a post-GATT (post-WTO?) perspective. In the GATT times, developed countries negotiated mutual concessions to open their markets, with developing countries being mainly excluded from having to do significant concessions (they were actually free riders).

This negotiation framework does not work anymore between developed countries and huge and powerful "developing countries " such as China, as developed countries have nothing to exchange anymore in exchange of more access to emerging countries. Unless, obviously, if they back-pedal on their WTO commitments, as the US is doing, in order to regain some negotiation space.

It is bad for global governance, because it means the previous rule-based system is unable to deliver new advances in today's multi-polar world. And it will be worst if, instead of back-pedalling at bilateral level, the US or other developed economies decide to withdraw from their WTO commitments in order to have better policy space to renegotiate a new deal with emerging economies.

It is bad for global growth, indeed. This said, the present slow-down was expected even before the China-USA tension and most experts were surprised by the high growth observed in, e.g., UK or in the USA, which contradicted their predictions.

What Hubert highlighted is the usual explanation of protectionism / trade liberalization " Trade « barriers » were usually set to protect domestic production from external competitors, at the cost of consumers ‘ welfare" However, developed countries' governments usually were preaching trade liberalization practicing at the same time protectionism in many fields. In the last trade negotiations under GATT there were e.g. green and red boxes for subsidies that could distort trade flows. Subsidies developed countries were using were in the 'green box' .

Dear all, currently the US presidential election capaign for 2020 starts. It will be interesting to see, if Donald Trump can again mobilize the white poor voters for his side - did he do any good for them? Or enough good? Did he create with his bold and anti-establishment approach enough new jobs for them? Or did he cause a lot of disruption which was mostly hot air but did not deliver the promises he made? The US voters will have to answer these questions in the next year or so... Possibly the US threats to global trade end after the election... The outcome will be awaited by many onlookers with great interest...

Dear Carsten Weerth , you are correct: GATT and later WTO's major goal is to reduce tariffs and to convert quota and other non-tariff trade barriers into tariffs. However the reality looks different, although average tariffs globally have declined a lot, market access for products of developing countries are still heavily regulated depending how they have an impact on national production.

The Reduction of trade Barriers should lead to win-win situations.

Dear Eberhard Weber . Not sure I can go with you on the "although average tariffs globally have declined a lot, market access for products of developing countries are still heavily regulated".

If you take "regulated" as "being submitted to quality checks for phyto-sanitary and safety norms", you are probably right, but the issue here is that you cannot easily lower the standards of consumer protection only to help least developed countries. Actually, the trend in most developed countries is towards more regulation on food and consumers good and norms are the hardest part of bilateral negotiations (e.g., betwee the EU and MERCOSUR, or between the EU and Canada). I fully agree that it may prove a barrier to least developed countries' exports, but I doubt you will convince many consumers to take the risk at least in the EU.

If you referred to tariff barriers in your comment, I am afraid you may refer to long past situations and not the present one. The WTO's Generalized System of Preferences has already many years in application and is a set of programmes by developed countries granting preferential tariffs to imports from developing countries. The GSP privilege can be suspended, it is true, when the exporting country has "emerged" and is competitive without assistance (the case of China, for example) or for political reasons (e.g., embargoes against some specific political regimes). Overall, and looking at the poor developing countries, the proportion of duty-free tariff lines has risen from 49% in 2005 to 65% in 2015 for Least Developed Countries, according to WTO.

Indeed, average tariffs levied by developed Members on products originating in LDCs are today close to 0%, with the exception of clothing and textiles because the USA restricts duty-free access to African and Caribbean countries, excluding large Asian exporters (I understand that the USA considers that Bangladesh and Cambodia don't need tariff subsidies to increase their market share in the USA and prefer to help other LDCs).

Moreover, a number of developing Members have joined the trend set by developed countries, and offer almost comprehensive duty-free market access to LDC products. This is probably the most interesting development, because many poor developing countries do not have the industrial capacity to export manufactures to developed countries (for many reasons, one being the high industrial standards required by these countries for their food and other consumer products, as we mentioned). Low barriers for trade between developing countries is therefore an important development to foster regional trade and develop an local export-oriented industry, as a stepping stone to more global export operations.

Major barriers to international trade

The three major barriers to international trade are natural barriers, such as distance and language; tariff barriers, or taxes on imported goods; and nontariff barriers. The nontariff barriers to trade include import quotas, embargoes, buy-national regulations, and exchange controls.

For further information, you may check this link:

https://opentextbc.ca/businessopenstax/chapter/barriers-to-trade/

Further examples of non-tariff barriers are:

- Costs of customs clearance,

- limited opening hours of customs offices,

- bribary,

- Phytosaitary inspections and other goods insprections by veternaries etc.

- the lack of publication of legislation and other cross-border trade...

interesting magazine article on why the world trade system may desintegrate further see https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/handelskrieg-warum-das-weltwirtschaftssystem-weiter-zerfallen-wird-a-1277238.html

Dear Colleagues and Friends from RG,

I would like to add a few words to the above discussion. The problem is very important, so it requires clarification and investigation. The discussion conducted on the Research Gate website shows that the current trade wars conducted among others between the world's largest economies can have a significant impact on the rate of global economic growth in the following quarters.

In the context of the above discussion, another key research question arises:

- Do you agree with the thesis that trade wars conducted among other things among the world's largest economies can have a significant impact on the pace of global economic growth in the following quarters?

- To what extent can the level of global economic growth decrease in 2020 as a result of trade wars between the world's largest economies?

- Will the largest economies of the world achieve their goal due to the conducted trade wars, which include the protection of domestic production, the national labor market and thus maintaining the optimal level of the country's economic development?

Please reply

I invite you to discussion

Thank you very much

I am with barriers of substance in international trade and even keep each state on the interests of its citizens this is one of tasks basic governments in the States respectable