Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/242539 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
Economics Working Paper Series No. 2015/08
Publisher: 
Auckland University of Technology (AUT), Faculty of Business, Economics and Law, Auckland
Abstract: 
We examine the history of economic thought on trade policy in New Zealand from the 1920s to the early 1980s. The focus is upon the different doctrinal perspectives taken by academic economists in New Zealand. Throughout the period under review policymakers supported an inward-looking trade and development regime buttressed by extensive interventionist trade policy. Appeals to the employment argument for industrialization through import substitution lent their policies a veneer of economic respectability. Most economists were not persuaded; they railed against quantitative import controls, discriminatory tariffs and cumbersome export incentive schemes and they offered, in vain, some constructive alternatives relying on price signals rather than administrative rules. One of our main findings is that most of the early work exposited here anticipated the rent seeking explanation for the configuration of trade policy.
Subjects: 
Trade Policy
Industrial Policy
Economic Thought
Rent Seeking
JEL: 
B20
F13
N77
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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