Conclusion

I plan to organize my overview of the discussions at the Kiel Week around a theoretical framework that hopefully may shed light on the longer run determinants of protection. After a brief discussion of the "classical" political economy of protection model, based on Baldwin [1982], a different approach is proposed, based on simple ideas borrowed from the theory of games. The analysis sheds light on why interest groups appear to survive with little apparent damage during periods that appear to be unfavorable to them and, paradoxically, also on why we still have a rather open trade system after more than ten years of recession.