Political Economy of Protectionism

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We investigate three topics about protectionism, using the Japan’s first safeguard actions in 2001 as acase example for our study to get a better understanding about protectionism. First, we examines what kind of factors can raise demands for import protection in local regions, from theoretical and empirical aspects, and finds that the number of safeguard petitions from local assemblies was strongly affected by some local political factors. Second, we examine theoretically the effect of media coverage on the influence peddling politics of a trade policy, and show that if voters who buys a newspaper to get information about the trade policy prefer the articles whose contents stand for their interests rather than the articles whose contents are adverse to their intere sts, the media coverage about the trade policy will be biased and can influence voters’ political support and politicians’ actions for the trade policy. Third,we show from theoretical and empirical aspects that the threat of invoking a safeguard measure on a politically sensitive good can induce a disruptive exporter of the good to voluntarily restrict its export volume, even though the WTO rule explicitly prohibits voluntary export restraints.