Suchergebnisse

Ancient Athens enacted what can be considered an early form of competition law in which grain retailers were banned from certain activities. The conventional understanding is that Athens was attempting to prevent grain hoarding. Careful analysis of the Athenian sources, however, suggests that the ban did not involve hoarding and addressed only the act of buying large quantities of grain. Athens may have been motivated to enact such a ban for a couple of reasons: 1) a perception that retailers violated moral concerns by raising prices and 2) pressure from more powerful groups to reduce the capabilities of the retailers. Grain storage was an important method of managing the city's food supply, so Athens may not have wanted to ban hoarding. This resembles the modern notion that commercial behavior should not be banned if doing so will impede beneficial activities.

Hard times give rise to greater demand for protection. International trade rules include provisions that allow for raising barriers to aid industries when they suffer economic injury. Yet widespread use of flexibility measures may undermine the trade system and worsen economic conditions. How do states balance these conflicting pressures? This article assesses the effect of crises on cooperation in trade. We hypothesize that governments impose less protectionism during economic crisis when economic troubles are widespread across countries than when they face crisis in isolation. The lesson of Smoot–Hawley and coordination through international economic institutions represent mechanisms of informal governance that encourage cooperation to avoid a spiral of protectionism. Analysis of industry-level data on protection measures for the period from 1996 to 2011 provides support for our claim that under conditions of shared hard times, states exercise strategic self-restraint to avoid beggar-thy-neighbor policies.