Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free TradeAbout two hundred years ago, largely as a result of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, free trade achieved an intellectual status unrivaled by any other doctrine in the field of economics. What accounts for the success of free trade against then prevailing mercantilist doctrines? And how well has free trade withstood various theoretical attacks that have challenged it since Adam Smith's time? In this readable intellectual history, Douglas Irwin explains how the idea of free trade has endured against the tide of the abundant criticisms that have been leveled against it from the ancient world and Adam Smith's day to the present. An accessible, nontechnical look at one of the most important concepts in the field of economics, Against the Tide will allow the reader to put the ever new guises of protectionist thinking into the context of the past and discover why the idea of free trade has so successfully prevailed over time. |
From inside the book
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... theoretical objections to free trade since that time . I have been guided by George Stigler's plea for the history of economic thought to concentrate more on ideas and concepts than on individuals and personalities , as well as by a ...
... theoretical anal- yses of Adam Smith and the classical economists . Smith and the classicals firmly established among economic thinkers the proposition that free trade is superior to import protection in producing a greater amount of ...
... theoretical argument for protection surfaces every few decades and sparks a contro- versy among economists about the strengths and weaknesses of the case for free trade . The infant industry argument for protection has achieved the ...
... theoretical terms , free trade generally means that there are no artificial impediments to the exchange of goods across national markets and that therefore the prices faced by domes- tic producers and consumers are the same as those ...
... theoretical and con- ceptual knowledge about economic policy has evolved and has been accu- mulated over time . Acquaintance with this knowledge gives us a perspec- tive in which we can understand where current insights about trade ...
Contents
Early Foreign Trade Doctrines | 11 |
The English Mercantilist Literature | 26 |
The Emergence of Free Trade Thought | 45 |
Physiocracy and Moral Philosophy | 64 |
Adam Smiths Case for Free Trade | 75 |
Free Trade in Classical Economics | 87 |
Torrens and the Terms of Trade Argument | 101 |
Mill and the Infant Industry Argument | 116 |
Manoilescu and the Wage Differential Argument | 153 |
The Australian Case for Protection | 172 |
The Welfare Economics of Free Trade | 180 |
Keynes and the Macroeconomics of Protection | 189 |
Strategic Trade Policy | 207 |
The Past and Future of Free Trade | 217 |
References | 231 |
253 | |