Trading Barriers

Why have countries increasingly restricted immigration even when they have opened their markets to foreign competition through trade or allowed their firms to move jobs overseas? In Trading Barriers, Margaret Peters argues that the increased ability of firms to produce anywhere in the world combined with growing international competition due to lowered trade barriers has led to greater limits on immigration. Peters explains that businesses relying on low-skill labor have been the major proponents of greater openness to immigrants. Immigration helps lower costs, making these businesses more competitive at home and abroad. However, increased international competition, due to lower trade barriers and greater economic development in the developing world, has led many businesses in wealthy countries to close or move overseas. Productivity increases have allowed those firms that have chosen to remain behind to do more with fewer workers. Together, these changes in the international economy have sapped the crucial business support necessary for more open immigration policies at home, empowered anti-immigrant groups, and spurred greater controls on migration. Debunking the commonly held belief that domestic social concerns are the deciding factor in determining immigration policy, Trading Barriers demonstrates the important and influential role played by international trade and capital movements.

Papers presented at the second annual World Trade Forum Conference held in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on August 28-29, 1998.

Written in the early 1980s against a backdrop of strengthening calls for a North American free trade agreement, this study examines the protectionist impulses masquerading as efforts to eliminate tariff barriers. In the wake of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the GATT), the popular assumption hailed it as a victory for freer trade. Lazar demonstrates that the trend was in fact towards a new protectionism based on the erection of non-tariff barriers specifically designed to subvert the GATT. In response, he called for a Canadian industrial strategy that promoted Canadian companies and encouraged exports. The New Protectionism is a subtle analysis of the rhetoric and reality of free trade as practised in the early 1980s.

This book explains why Canadians must rid themselves of interprovincial trade barriers. Canada's provinces do almost as much trade with each other as they do with the rest of the world. But trade between the provinces is harder than with foreign countries. We trouble our own house with an amazing variety of barriers: professionals and tradespeople cannot move freely and practice where they wish, regulation makes it hard for investments to flow to where they are most needed, provincial governments give contracts to local firms even though out-of-province firms can do the job at a lower cost, Ottawa pays the most generous UI to regions with the highest unemployment and thereby encourages people to stay in parts of the country with little promise. The effects of such barriers on the economy are difficult to measure, which may be the reason that little has been done about them. But Canadians cannot afford to ignore their costs. The European Community is very close to the goal of ensuring free trade among its members. Unless we unlock our potential we may fall behind other countries and communities that have recognized the importance of internal as well as external free trade.

Limits to Free Trade ranges over a wide diversity of relevant issues ranging from international agreements, to regional trade policies, to import trade barriers, to movements for trade reforms. Informed, informative, and strongly recommended for academic library reference and resource collections, Limits to Free Trade is a model of detailed and articulate scholarship. The Midwest Book Review This book explores the growing list of non-tariff trade barriers raised by the US, EU and Japan and assesses the prospects for significant trade liberalization. The author examines the liability of global free trade through a review of the complaints that these three countries raised about each other over a five-year period. He concludes that free trade may be increasingly hampered as barriers are created more rapidly than can be resolved, and that the prospects for significantly strengthening safeguards are limited. These issues are analyzed in the contexts of the major WTO trade agreements and the political economy of decision-making in the US, EU and Japan. The author concludes that the growing problems are endemic to the system and are not amenable to easy remedy. He tackles topics including international agreements, the trade policy processes in the three regions, issues concerning trade practices, import trade barriers in the EU, and prospects for reform. Scholars, students and practitioners in business economics, international business, and international economics will find much of interest in this book.