ABSTRACT

The role of international trade in industrialization processes and economic development has attracted a great deal of attention in the professional literature of economics. Trade policy features prominently in theoretical analyses of growth and development, in studies of economic history of both the industrial and developing countries, and in current normative and prescriptive writing on appropriate policies for the developing countries. Indeed, trade policy may have received disproportionate attention in the mainstream of the development economics literature relative to, say, the issues surrounding the means of increasing productivity in smallholder agriculture in low-income countries, or, in the industrial sector, other (nontrade) policies impacting upon the capacities of firms to respond to changing incentives or even upon incentive structures themselves.