Trade Protection and the U.S. Steel Industry

世界范围内的大多数贸易保护措施都与少数几个突出部门有关，如钢铁、汽车、农业、纺织、服装和木材。未来的贸易自由化努力将不得不面对各种问题，这些问题不仅使这些部门的贸易保护程度相对较高，而且持续存在。相对而言，很少有人研究这些独特行业的长期贸易保护历史的有效性，更不用说认真研究这些行业自己关于为什么需要持续贸易保护的主张了。本研究开发了检验各种贸易保护计划有效性的方法，以及行业共同主张的优点，即贸易保护是必要的，以抵消世界市场上政府补贴的过剩产能。本研究将设计和估计计量经济模型，使用钢铁行业的数据来正式检查这些说法，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，各种形式的贸易保护在多大程度上影响了钢铁行业的业绩？第二，国外市场的产能过剩在多大程度上导致了进口渗透的增加和行业绩效的下降？第三，政府补贴在多大程度上扭曲了主要市场钢铁行业的投资决策？虽然这项研究使用钢铁工业的数据来审查这些问题，但为解决钢铁工业中的这些问题而制定的方法可以立即应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各样的其他研究人员有用。

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.