Trade Protection and the U.S. Steel Industry

世界范围内的大多数贸易保护努力都与钢铁、汽车、农业、纺织品、服装和木材等少数几个重要部门有关。未来的贸易自由化努力将不得不面对各种问题，这些问题使这些部门的贸易保护不仅相对较高，而且持续存在。在考察这些独特部门这种长期贸易保护的有效性方面，工作相对较少，更不用说认真审查这些行业自己的主张，即为什么需要持续的贸易保护。这项研究开发了各种方法，以检查各种贸易保护计划的有效性，以及各行业共同声称的贸易保护对于抵消世界市场上政府补贴的过剩产能是必要的好处。这项研究将设计和评估计量经济学模型，利用钢铁行业的数据来正式检验这些主张，同时控制以前的经济文献提出的其他因素，作为美国钢铁行业衰落的替代原因。工作将沿着三个相关的研究问题进行。首先，为钢铁行业提供的各种形式的贸易保护在多大程度上影响了行业表现？其次，外国市场的产能过剩在多大程度上导致了进口渗透率的提高和行业表现的下降？第三，在多大程度上，政府补贴在多大程度上扭曲了主要市场的钢铁行业投资决策？虽然这项研究使用钢铁行业的数据来研究这些问题，但为解决钢铁行业这些问题而开发的方法立即适用于寻求贸易救济的其他部门。拟议的研究还将导致建立一些关于贸易保护措施和世界钢铁工业的详细数据库，这些数据库将对各种其他研究人员有用。

The majority of worldwide trade protection efforts are connected with a few prominent sectors, such as steel, automobiles, agriculture, textiles, apparel and lumber. Future trade liberalization efforts will have to confront the various issues that make trade protection in these sectors not only relatively high, but persistent. There has been relatively little work to examine the effectiveness of this long history of trade protection in these unique sectors, much less to seriously examine the industries' own claims for why continual trade protection is necessary. This research develops methodologies to examine the effectiveness of various trade protection programs, as well as the merits of a common claim by industries that trade protection is necessary to counteract government subsidized excess capacity in world markets. This research will design and estimate econometric models to formally examine these claims using data on the steel industry, while simultaneously controlling for other factors that previous economic literature has proposed as alternative reasons for the decline of the US steel industry. Work will proceed along three connected research questions. First, to what extent has the various forms of trade protection afforded the steel industry affected industry performance? Second, to what extent has excess capacity in foreign markets led to increased import penetration and decreased industry performance? Third, to what extent has subsidization by governments distorted investment decisions in the steel industry across the major markets? While the research examines these issues using data on the steel industry, the methodologies developed to the address these issues in the steel industry have immediate applications to other sectors that have sought trade relief. The proposed research will also lead to the construction of a number of detailed databases on trade protection measures and the world steel industry that will be useful for a wide variety of other researchers.