Political Economy of Protectionism

为了更好地理解保护主义，我们以2001年日本的第一次保障措施为例，考察了三个有关保护主义的话题。首先，我们从理论和实证两个方面考察了哪些因素可以提高地方地区的进口保护需求，发现地方议会的保障措施请愿数量受到一些地方政治因素的强烈影响。其次，我们从理论上考察了媒体报道对贸易政策影响力兜售政治的影响，并表明，如果购买报纸获取贸易政策信息的选民更喜欢内容代表自己利益的文章，而不是内容与他们感兴趣的STS背道而驰的文章，那么媒体对贸易政策的报道就会产生偏见，并会影响选民对贸易政策的政治支持和政客的行为。第三，我们从理论和经验方面证明，威胁对政治敏感的商品援引保障措施可以诱使商品的破坏性出口国自愿限制其出口量，尽管世贸组织规则明确禁止自愿出口限制。

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.