ABSTRACT
The relation between trade policy and growth is a fundamental question that requires an answer based on empirical evidence. Measuring the level of protection in an economy through time and across countries is the main problem with which researchers have been struggling when trying to answer this question. Economic historians and development economists still depend on the traditional and theoretically poorly based measures of protection as the best available instruments to study empirically the relation between trade and growth in the long run.3 The trade-weighted average tariff is the most widely known measure to isolate the effect of tariff policies from that of other policies and provides a very convenient index of protection across time because it is easily calculated as the ratio of tariff revenues over import values.4
