The Smoot-Hawley Fixation: Putting the Sino-US Trade War in Contemporary and Historical Perspective Simon J. Evenett1 University of St. Gallen, the St. Gallen Endowment for Prosperity Through Trade2 and CEPR 29 September 2019 This paper was published in the Journal of International Economic Law on 6 December 2019. Unfortunately, the published version excluded many of the pertinent footnotes that lawyers love and that, more importantly, support key elements of the argument. For this reason we make the full version of the paper available here. 1 Professor of International Trade and Economic Development, Department of Economics, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and Coordinator, the Global Trade Alert, the independent commercial policy monitor. I thank Patrick Buess, Johannes Fritz, Maxime Kantenwein, and Piotr Lukaszuk for help preparing the empirical evidence for this paper. I thank Anne van Aaken, Chad Bown, Andrew Lang, two referees, and Piotr Lukaszuk for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I also thank Doug Irwin, Kevin O’Rourke, and Niko Wolf for checking my characterisation of the economic history literature on trade policy developments in the 1930s. All remaining errors are mine. Comments are welcome and should be sent to
[email protected]. 2 Founder of the new non-profit Foundation to house the Global Trade Alert and other commercial policy- related initiatives. Abstract The extent to which the Sino-US trade war represents a break from the past is examined. This ongoing trade war is benchmarked empirically against the Smoot-Hawley tariff increase and against the sustained, covert discrimination by governments against foreign commercial interests witnessed since the start of the global economic crisis.