The United States became a net exporter of manufactured goods around 1910 after a dramatic surge in iron and steel exports began in the mid-1890s. This paper argues that natural-resource abundance fueled the expansion of iron and steel exports in part by enabling a sharp reduction in the price of U.S. exports relative to other competitors. The commercial exploitation of the Mesabi iron ore range, for example, reduced domestic ore prices by 50% in the mid-1890s and was equivalent to over a decade's worth of industry productivity improvement in its effect on iron and steel export prices. The nontradability of American ore resulted in its distinctive impact on the pattern of U.S. trade. The results are consistent with Wright's (1990) finding that U.S. manufactured exports were natural-resource-intensive at this time.

In the two years after the imposition of the Smoot-Hawley tariff in June 1930, the volume of U.S. imports fell over 40%. To what extent can this collapse of trade be attributed to the tariff itself versus other factors such as declining income or foreign retaliation? Partial and general equilibrium assessments indicate that the Smoot-Hawley tariff itself reduced imports by 4-8% (ceteris paribus), although the combination of specific duties and deflation further raised the effective tariff and reduced imports an additional 8-10%. A counterfactual simulation suggests that nearly a quarter of the observed 40% decline in imports can be attributed to the rise in the effective tariff (i.e., Smoot-Hawley plus deflation).

Immediately following World War II, many economists believed that a trade policy based on import substitution would best promote economic development. Subsequent experience instead revealed the costs of protectionism (Anne 0. Krueger, 1997). In the late 19th century as well, many political economists (such as Friedrich List) advocated import tariffs to promote the growth of domestic manufacturing in countries that were behind the industrial leader, then the United Kingdom. Unlike the recent period, however, the late 19th-century experience is often interpreted as confirming the wisdom of import substitution.' Recent work by Kevin H. O'Rourke (2000) and Michael A. Clemens and Jeffrey G. Williamson (2001) has strengthened this impression by finding a positive correlation between import tariffs and economic growth across countries from 1875 to 1914. Such a correlation does not establish a causal relationship between tariffs and growth, but it is tempting to view the correlation as constituting evidence that protectionist or inward-oriented trade strategies were successful during this period. This paper argues that such a conclusion is unwarranted and that the tariff-growth correlation should be interpreted with great care. First, several individual country experiences in the late 19th century are not consistent with the view that import substitution promoted growth. For example, the two most rapidly expanding, high-tariff countries of the period (Argentina and Canada) grew because capital imports helped stimulate export-led growth in agriculturalstaples products, not because of protectionist trade policies. Second, most land-abundant countries (such as Argentina and Canada) imposed high tariffs to raise government revenue, and revenue tariffs have a different structure than protective tariffs. The fact that labor-scarce, land-abundant countries had a high potential for growth and also tended to impose high revenue-generating tariffs confounds the inference that high tariffs were responsible for their strong economic performance during this period.

The classical economists engaged in a vigorous debate over whether Britain's tariff reductions in the 1840s should be made contingent on tariff liberalization abroad. Some, notably Robert Torrens, believed that a unilateral tariff reduction would so deteriorate British terms of trade as to outweigh efficiency gains and make the country worse off. In this paper, Britain's foreign trade elasticities are estimated for this period in a simultaneous equation model. They are used in a simple general equilibrium model that explicitly takes the terms of trade into account to assess the welfare impact of tariff reductions. The results indicate that Britain would have been made worse off from a unilateral tariff reduction. However, foreign tariff reductions mitigated the terms of trade deterioration and could easily have made Britain better off.

The semiconductor industry is often cited as a strategic industry in part because important learning spillovers may justify special industrial policies. Using quarterly, firm-level data on seven generations of dynamic random access memory semiconductors over 1974-92, the authors find that learning rates average 20 percent, firms learn three times more from an additional unit of their own cumulative production than from an additional unit of another firm's cumulative production, learning spills over just as much between firms in different countries as between firms within a given country, and intergenerational learning spillovers are weak.