贸易保护主义 中英文.docx

Trade Protectionism贸易保护主义1 The fact that trade protection hurts the economy of the country that imposes it is one of the oldest but still most startling insights economics has to offer. The idea dates back to the origin of economic science itself. Adam Smiths The Wealth of Nations, which gave birth to economics, already contained the argument for free trade: by specializing in production instead of producing everything, each nation would profit from free trade. In international economics it is the direct counterpart to the proposition that people within a economy will all be better off if all people specialize at what they do best instead of trying to sell sufficient.1.贸易保护伤害贸易伙伴国的经济，这一经济学上的见解，虽然老套但仍令人吃惊。它的来历可以追溯到经济学的起源。当亚当斯密写出国富论，催生经济学，其中已经包含了自由贸易的观点:通过生产专门化而不是生产一切,每个国家都将从自由贸易中获利。在国际经济学中，与其相对应的命题是：在一个经济体系内，如果所有人都专注于做自己最擅长的，而不是去卖足够多的东西，那么每个人都将更好。 2 It is important to distinguish between the case for free trade for oneself and the case for trade for all. The former is an argument for free trade to improve one nations own welfare (the so-called “nation-efficiency” argument). The latter is an argument for free trade to improve every trading countrys welfare (the so-called “cosmopolitan-efficiency” argument). Underlying both cases is the assumption that prices are determined by free markets. But government may distort market prices by, for example, subsidizing production, as European governments have done in aerospace, electronics, and steel in recent years, and as all industrial countries do in agriculture. Or governments may protect intellectual property inadequately, causing underproduction of new knowledge. In such cases production and trade, guided by distorted prices, will not be efficient.2.区分国内自由贸易和对所有国家开放的自由贸易是很重要的。前者是意在增加本国财富的条例（称为“国家效益”条例），后者是意在增加每一个贸易参与国财富的条例（称为“国际效益”条例）。以上两种情况都是基于自由市场决定价格这一假设之上的。但政府也可能通过像补贴生产的手段调控市场价格。列如近些年欧洲政府对航空，电子，钢铁行业的补贴，所有工业国对农业的补贴。政府还可能过度保护知识产权，导致新技术不能充分发挥它的价值。在这种情况下，生产和贸易受调控的价格影响，无法实现其最佳效益。3 The cosmopolitan-efficiency case for free trade is relevant to questions such as the design of international trade regimes. For example, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade oversees world trade among member nations, just as the International Monetary Fund oversees international macroeconomics and exchange rates. The national-efficiency case for free trade concerns national trade policies; it is, in fact, Adam Smiths case for free trade. Economists typically have the nation-efficiency case in mind when they talk of the advantage of free trade and of the folly of protectionism.3.自由贸易所产生的国际效益与诸如国际贸易体制的设立等问题有关。例如，就像国际货币基金组织调控国际宏观经济和汇率一样，关税贸易总协定负责监督所有成员国之间的贸易。而自由贸易中的国家效益与国家的贸易政策有关；这事实上就是亚当斯密的自由贸易论。但当经济学家谈到利用自由贸易，讽刺贸易保护主义时，他们首先想到的通常是国家效益。4. This case, as refined greatly by economists in the postwar period, admits two theoretical possibilities in which protection could improve a nations economic wellbeing. First, as Adam Smith himself noted, a country might be able to use threat of protection to get other countries to reduce their protection against its exports. Thus, threatened protection could be a tool to pry open foreign market, like oysters, with “a strong clasp knife,” as Lord Randolph Churchill put it the late nineteenth century. If the protectionist threat worked, then the county using it would gain doubly: form its own free trade and from its trading partners free trade as well. However, both Smith and later economists in Britain feared that such threats would not work. They feared that the protection imposed as a threat would be permanent and that the threat would not lower the other countries trade barriers.4.这种观点，在二战后被经济学家热捧，他们认同能够有助于国家经济的两种理论。首先,正如亚当斯密本人所指出的,一个国家可能通过贸易保护来胁迫其他国家减少针对其出口产品的贸易保护。因此，贸易保护的威胁也可以作为工具来撬开国际市场，像牡蛎,伦道夫丘吉尔勋爵利用它作为“一把强势的折刀”打入19世纪末的市场。如果贸易保护威胁论有效，那么利用它的国家将会得到双重影响：形成自己内部的自由贸易和形成与贸易伙伴国的自由贸易。然而，斯密和之后的经济学家都担心这种威胁不会有效。他们担心贸易保护的威胁是永久性的，而这种威胁并不能降低其他国家的贸易壁垒。5. The trade policy of the united states today is premised on a different assessment: that indeed U.S markets can, and should, be closed as a means of opening new markets abroad. This premise underlies sections 301 through 310 of the 1988 Omnibus Trade and competitiveness Act. These provisions permit, and sometimes even require, the U.S government to force other countries into accepting new trade. They can , for instance, take the form of voluntary quotas on exports of certain goods to the United States. Thus, they may simply force weak nations to redirect their trade in ways that strong nations desire, cutting away at the principle that trade should be guided by market prices.5.美国如今的贸易政策是以不同的评估意见为前提的:即事实上美国市场能够,并且应该被关闭,以打开新的国外市场。这个前提是基于1988年综合贸易竞争法的301条到310条,这些条款允许,有时甚至需要,美国政府迫使其他国家接受新的贸易。例如,他们可以采取自愿的形式将某些商品出口到美国。因此,他们可能只是迫使弱小国家定向向贸易强国出口他们需要的产品,违背了贸易应遵循市场价格的原则。 6.The second exception in which protection could improve a nations economic well-being is when a country has monopoly power over a good. Since the time of John Stuart Mill, economists have argued that a country produces a large percentage of the worlds output of a good can use an “ optimum” tariff to take advantage of its latent monopoly power and, thus, gain more from trade. This is, of course, the same as saying that a monopolist will maximize his profits by raising his price and reducing his output.6.其次，当一个国家能够垄断一种商品时，贸易保护就能够增加这个国家的经济利益。自约翰斯图尔特米尔所处的时代后,经济学家们认为,一个国家的某种商品，若在世界出口中占很大比重，便能通过一个“最佳”的关税价格来获得潜在的垄断力量，从而在贸易中获得更多利益。当然，这也就是说垄断者会通过提高产品价格和减少出口来最大化他们的利润。 7. Two objections to this second argument immediately come to mind. First, with rare exceptions such as OPEC, few countries seem to have significant monopoly power in enough goods to make this an important, practical exception to rule of free trade. Second, other countries might retaliate against the optimum tariff. Therefore, the likelihood of successful (i.e.welfare-increasing ) exploitation of monopoly power becomes quite dubious. Several economists have recently made their academic reputations by finding theoretical cases in which oligopolistic markets enable governments to use import tariffs to improve national welfare, but even these researchers have advised strongly against protectionist policies.7.但我们立即能想到针对第二种观点的反对意见。首先，除石油输出国家组织这种罕见的例外，似乎很少有国家能够有足够多的商品，拥有至关重要的垄断权力,来制订自由贸易外重要并具有实用性的规则。其次，其他国家可能会对最优关税进行反击。因此，获得垄断权利（如：增加福利）是十分没有把握的。一些经济学家最近通过寻找理论案例来提升自己的国际声誉，在这些案例中，寡头垄断市场使政府能够利用进口关税，改善国民福利，但即使是这些研究人员也建议强烈反对保护主义政策。 8 One may well think that any market failure could be a reason for protection. Economists did fail into trap until the fifties. Economist now argue, instead, that protection would be an inappropriate way to correct for most market failures. For example, if wages do not adjust quickly enough when demand for an industrys product falls, as was the case with U.S. autoworkers losing out to foreign competition, the appropriate government intervention, if any , should be in the labor market, directly aimed at the source of the problem. Protection would be , at best, an inefficient way of correcting for the market failure.有人可能会认为，任何市场失灵都可能是贸易保护的原因。十五世纪以前，经济学家确实陷入了这一误区。而今，经济学家认为，以贸易保护调整多数市场失灵是不恰当的。例如，就拿美国汽车工人输给了外国竞争对手这一案例来说，当一个行业的产品需求下降，如果工资不调整的速度不够快，政府就应该适当的干预劳动力市场，直接针对问题的根源。贸易保护，充其量是纠正市场失灵的一个低效的方式。9. Many economists also believe that even if protection were appropriate in theory, it would be “captured” in practice by special interests who would misuse it to pursue their own interest instead of letting it be used for the nation interest. One clear cost of protection is that the country imposing it forces its consumers to forgo cheap imports. But another important cost of protection may well be the lobbying costs incurred by those seeking protection. These lobbying activities, now extensively studied by economists, are variously described as rent-seeking or directly unproductive profit-seeking activities. They are unproductive because they produce profit or income for those who lobby without creating valuable output for the rest of society.许多经济学家还认为,即使按理论适当保护贸易，在实践中，它也会被特殊利益集团“捕获”滥用它追求自身的利益,而不是用它来维护国家利益。贸易保护明显的成本之一就是实施贸易保护的国家要迫使其消费者放弃廉价的进口。另一重要的成本很可能是那些寻求贸易保护的游说费用。这些被经济学家广泛研究的游说活动，多被描述为寻租或直接地非生产性逐利活动。之说以说他们是非生产性的，是因为他们是为那些只游说的人赚取利益和收入，而这部分人并不为社会他人创造价值。 10 .Protectionism arises in ingenious ways. As free trade advocates squelch it in one place, it pops up in another. Protectionists seem to always be one step ahead of free traders in creating new ways to protect against foreign competitors.10.贸易保护主义总会投机取巧的出现，当自由贸易倡导者在一处压制它，它便在另一处冒出来。贸易保护主义者似乎总是比自由贸易主义者先一步找到新方法来抵制外国的竞争者。 11. One way is by replacing restrictions on imports with what are euphemistically called “voluntary” export restrictions (VERs） or “orderly” market arrangements (OMAs). Instead of the importing country restricting imports with quotas or tariffs, the exporting country restricts exports. The protectionist effect is still the same. The real difference, which makes exporting nations prefer restrictions on exports to restrictions on imports, is that the VERs enable the exporters to charge higher prices and thus collect for themselves the higher prices caused by protection.一种方法是通过所谓的“自愿”出口减排限制或者“有序”的市场安排代替贸易保护之说，这并不是说进口国家限制进口配额或关税,而是出口国家限制出口。这跟贸易保护的效果是一样的。真正的不同在于“自愿”出口减排限制使出口商要收取更高的价格，以此来抵消贸易保护所带来的商品价格上涨，这使得出口国倾向于通过限制出口来限制进口。12. That has been the case with Japans voluntary quotas on exports of cars to the United States. The United States could have kept Japanese car imports in check by slapping a tariff on them. That would raise the price, so that consumers would buy fewer. Instead, Japan limits the number of cars shipped to the United States. Since supply is lower than it would be in the absence of the quotas, Japanese car makers can charge higher prices and still sell all their exports to the United States. The accrual of the resulting extra profits from the voluntary export restraint may also have helped the Japanese auto producers to find the funds to make investments that made them yet more competitive!12. 已有的案例便是日本主动限制出口到美国的汽车的配额。美国可以通过对其征收关税来控制日本汽车进口数量。这一举措会提高日本汽车的价格，从而减少消费者的购买量。反之,日本也限制运往美国的汽车数量。因为当出口低于配额时，日本汽车制造商仍然能将所有出口到美国的汽车卖出更高的价格。由志愿出口限制所产生的自然增长的额外利润又可能帮助日本汽车生产商找到资金来进行投资,使他们更有竞争力! 13 The growth of VERs in the eighties is a disturbing development for a second reason as well. They selectively target suppliers (in this case Japan) instead of letting the market decide who will lose when trade must be restricted. As an alternative, the United States could have provided just as much protection for domestic automakers by putting a quota or tariff on all foreign cars, letting consumers decide whether they wanted to buy fewer Japanese cars or fewer European ones. With VERs, in other words, politics replaces economic efficiency as the criterion determining who trades what.这也是八十年代自愿减排国家的增长让人不安的第二个原因。在这种情况下，他们（日本）会选择性的针对供应商，而不是让市场决定当必须限制进口时谁会失去生意。作为替代方案，美国可能通过把所有的外国汽车配额或关税，让消费者自行决定是否要少买日本车或更少的欧洲车，由此为汽车制造商提供同样多的保护。志愿减排限制，换言之，就是政治效益取代经济效益来决定谁交易什么。 14. Protectionism recently has come in another, more insidious form than VERs. Economics call the new form “administered protection.” Nearly all industrialized countries today have what are called “fair trade “ laws. The stated purpose of these laws is twofold: to ensure that foreign nations do not subsidize exports (which would distort market incentives and hence destroy efficient allocation of activity among the worlds nations) and to guarantee that foreign firms do not dump their exports in a prefatory fashion. Nations, therefore, provide for procedures under which, when subsidization or dumping is found to occur, a countervailing duty (CVD) against foreign subsidy or an antidumping (AD) duty can be levied. These two “ fair trade” mechanisms are meant to complement free trade.最近贸易保护主义已发展到比自愿减排更隐蔽的形式。经济学上称之为“管理性保护”。如今，几乎所有的工业化国家都有所谓的“公平贸易”的法律。这些法律的目的是双重的：确保外国不补贴出口（这会扭曲市场激励机制，破坏世界各国之间的贸易活动的有效配置），保证外国公司不在出口时抛售过时的产品。因此，在此规定下，补贴或倾销发生时，国家可以对其征收反补贴税或反倾销税。也就是说，这两个“公平贸易”机制是为了补充自由贸易。 15 In practice, however, when protectionist pressures rise, “fair trade” is misused to work against free trade. Thus, CVD and AD actions often are started against successful foreign firms simply to harass them and coerce them into accepting VERs. Practices which are thoroughly normal at home are proscribed as predatory when foreign firms engage in them. As one trade analyst put it, “If the same anti-dumping laws applied to U.S. companies, every after-Christmas sale in the country would be banned.”然而，在实践中，当保护主义压力上升，“公平贸易”就会被滥用来反对自由贸易。反补贴税或反倾销税往往是针对成功的外国公司，简单地困扰他们，强迫他们接受自愿减排量。实际上，这就是掠夺，是当外国公司参与国内贸易时进行的完全正当的掠夺。正如一位行业分析师说的那样，如果同样反倾销的法律应用于美国公司，那么美国每一个圣诞节后的大甩卖都要被禁止。16. Much economic analysis shows that in the eighties “fair trade” mechanisms turned increasingly into protectionist instruments used unfairly against foreign competition. U.S. rice producers got a countervailing duty imposed on rice from Thailand, for example, by establishing that the Thai government was subsidizing rice exports by less than 1 percentand ignoring the fact that Thailand also slapped a 5 percent tax on export. We usually think a foreign firm is dumping when it sells at lower prices in our market than in its own. But the U.S. government took an antidumping action against Polands exports of golf carts even though no golf carts were sold in Poland.许多经济分析表明，在八十年代“公平贸易”机制日益成为贸易保护主义者的手段，用来不公平地对待外国竞争者。例如，美国稻米生产者将反倾销税强加给泰国的大米，通过证明泰国政府给大米出口提供了小于百分之一的补贴，并无视泰国也收取了5%的出口税这一事实。通常，当外国公司在我们国家销售产品的价格低于在它本国的价格时，我们认为它是倾销。但虽然高尔夫球车没有在波兰销售，美国政府仍对波兰出口的高尔夫球车采取的反倾销行动。 17. Therefore, economists have thought increasingly about how these “fair trade “ mechanism