A reason why countries eliminate international trade restrictions is to:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, countries around the world have faced acute shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), medicines and other essential medical supplies, severely compounding the health crisis. Such shortages remain an acute and pressing problem, and are expected to worsen during a second wave.

Índice Show

Restrictions could escalate in second wave
Full self-sufficiency impossible
Four recommendations

Many countries have responded to shortages by imposing export restrictions in an effort to bolster their own domestic supplies. But even though governments should seek to protect their populations, the use of export restrictions is damaging to global health systems — and ultimately undermines efforts to combat the coronavirus.

At the onset of the pandemic, nearly 100 countries enacted temporary restrictions or bans on the export of medical products.

Germany and France, for example, placed export restrictions on medical equipment and drugs, which were followed by an European Union-wide ban on medical equipment exports to non-EU countries.

India — the world’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturer — restricted the export of dozens of drugs, including acetaminophen and various antibiotics.

The United States halted the sale of masks and other medical gear to foreign buyers. A range of other countries followed suit, imposing various forms of restrictions, ranging from outright export prohibitions to cumbersome licensing requirements to discourage exports.

Restrictions could escalate in second wave

While some export restrictions have since been removed, many remain in place. And with a second wave looming, there is a risk that the use of such restrictions will escalate once again.

Export restrictions hurt the countries that implement them, as well as their trading partners, by preventing deliveries of medical supplies and medicines, which can seriously disrupt health planning.

People wait to be tested for COVID-19 at a clinic in Montréal in September 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

Export restrictions can temporarily lower domestic prices and raise availability, giving the illusion of efficacy, but they discourage investments to increase production capacity, so any benefit is short-lived.

Countries that impose export restrictions are also likely to fuel retaliation or emulation by other nations, cutting off their own access to medical products and components.

Export restrictions therefore reduce the domestic availability of medical supplies, while also promoting panic-buying, hoarding and speculation.

Read more: Coronavirus hoarding: Why you can stop amassing toilet paper

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is supposed to prevent governments from arbitrarily imposing barriers to the flow of goods across borders. But during the COVID-19 crisis, its rules have failed to stop countries from imposing export restrictions.

Existing WTO rules give considerable scope to governments to respond to emergencies, including permitting trade measures to protect human health, and allowing temporary export restrictions to prevent or relieve shortages of essential products.

Full self-sufficiency impossible

Some have suggested that the answer to supply shortages is to reshore production, so that each country produces its own medical supplies.

But that’s neither realistic nor desirable. Medical supply chains are global in nature and, given the complexity of the products involved, it would be impossible for any one country to be fully self-sufficient.

To take just one example, ventilators require as many as 1,000 parts, coming from dozens of countries and nine layers of suppliers. Trade in medical supplies and the components required to produce them is, therefore, essential.

A patient is attached to a ventilator in the COVID-19 intensive care unit at St. Paul’s hospital in downtown Vancouver in April 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

Four recommendations

We propose four policy directions to address the trade-related aspects of the crisis:

Governments must strengthen their commitment to prevent export restrictions in critical medical supplies. A group of nine countries, led by New Zealand and Singapore, has launched a multi-country pact to keep supply chains open and remove trade restrictions on essential goods. This initiative should be expanded through a WTO agreement to refrain from introducing measures that restrict trade in medical supplies.
Governments should pursue diversification, rather than domestication, of medical supply chains. Countries are most vulnerable to serious shortages when they rely heavily on just a handful of suppliers for critical goods, regardless of whether those suppliers are domestic or foreign. Diversification is therefore the best way to reduce the risk of supply chain disruptions.
Rather than competing with one another for scarce medical goods, states should be collaborating to address the underlying problem. Amid a global pandemic, beggar-thy-neighbour (or sicken-thy-neighbour) trade policies intended to bolster a country’s own medical supplies at the expense of others are counter-productive. Instead, the most effective means to address the supply shortage is through international co-operation to boost production, diversify medical supply chains and ensure supplies can move to where they are needed the most.
Governments must significantly increase their investment in stockpiling reserves of essential medical supplies. Many countries maintain such stockpiles — containing everything from masks and gowns to ventilators — but chronic under-funding left them dangerously unprepared for the current crisis. When the pandemic hit, countries rapidly depleted their limited stocks. The resulting supply shortage was caused not by dependence on trade, but a failure in planning.

Export restrictions are damaging both to the countries that implement them as well as their trading partners. As we stare down a second wave of COVID-19, there are far better alternatives to prevent shortages and ensure adequate supply of medical goods.

Developing nations in particular often lack the institutional machinery needed for effective imposition of income or corporation taxes (see income tax). The governments of such nations may then finance their activity by resorting to tariffs on imported goods, since such levies are relatively easy to administer. The amount of tax revenue obtainable through tariffs, however, is always limited. If the government tries to increase its tariff income by imposing higher duty rates, this may choke off the flow of imports and so reduce tariff revenue instead of increasing it.

Probably the most common argument for tariff imposition is that particular domestic industries need tariff protection for survival. Comparative-advantage theorists will naturally argue that the industry in need of such protection ought not to survive and that the resources so employed ought to be transferred to occupations having greater comparative efficiency. The welfare gain of citizens taken as a whole would more than offset the welfare loss of those groups affected by import competition; that is, total real national income would increase. An opposing argument would be, however, that this welfare gain would be widely diffused, so that the individual beneficiaries might not be conscious of any great improvement. The welfare loss, in contrast, would be narrowly and acutely felt. Although resources can be transferred to other occupations, just as comparative-advantage theory says, the transfer process is sometimes slow and painful for those being transferred. For such reasons, comparative-advantage theorists rarely advocate the immediate removal of all existing tariffs. They argue instead against further tariff increases—since increases, if effective, attract still more resources into the wrong occupation—and they press for gradual reduction of import barriers.

Romney Robinson

Advocates of protection often argue that new and growing industries, particularly in less-developed countries, need to be shielded from foreign competition. They contend that costs decline with growth and that some industries must reach a minimum size before they are able to compete with well-established industries abroad. Tariffs can protect the domestic market until the industry becomes internationally competitive and, it is often argued, the costs of protection can be recouped after the industry has reached maturity. In short, the infant-industry argument is based principally on the idea that there are economies of large-scale production in many industries and that developing countries have difficulty in establishing such industries.

Advocates of such protection, however, can have their arguments turned against them. While an individual country can, in some circumstances, gain from protecting its infant industries, this protection is particularly costly for the international community as a whole. Where there are major advantages in large-scale production, there are also large advantages in relatively free international trade. By closing off markets, protection reduces the ability of firms to gain large-scale economies by exporting. If a group of countries imposes infant-industry protection, it will split up the market; each country may end up with small-scale, localized, inefficient production, thus reducing the prosperity of all of the countries. One way in which less-developed nations have tried to deal with this problem has been through the establishment of customs unions or other regional groupings (see International trade arrangements).

Infant-industry tariffs have been disappointing in other ways; the infant-industry argument is often abused in practice. In many developing countries, industries have failed to attain international competitiveness even after 15 or 20 years of operation and might not survive if protective tariffs were removed. The infant industry is probably better aided by production subsidies than by tariffs. Production subsidies do not raise prices and therefore do not curtail domestic demand, and the cost of the protection is not concealed in higher prices to consumers. Production subsidies, however, have the disadvantage of drawing upon government revenue rather than adding to it, which may be a serious consideration in countries at lower levels of development. (See also economic development.)

Bela Balassa Trent J. Bertrand Paul Wonnacott

Tariffs or quotas are also sometimes proposed as a way to maintain domestic employment—particularly in times of recession. There is, however, near-unanimity among modern-day economists that proposals to remedy unemployment by means of tariff increases are misguided. Insofar as a higher tariff is effective for this purpose, it simply “exports unemployment”; that is, the rise in domestic employment is matched by a drop in production in some foreign country. That other country, moreover, is likely to impose a retaliatory tariff increase. Finally, the tariff remedy for unemployment is a poor one because it is usually ineffective and because more suitable remedies are available. It has come to be generally recognized that unemployment is far more efficiently dealt with by the implementation of proper fiscal and monetary policies.

A common appeal made by an industry seeking tariff or quota protection is that its survival is essential for the national interest: its product would be needed in wartime, when the supply of imports might well be cut off. The verdict of economists on this argument is fairly clear: the national-defense argument is frequently a red herring, an attempt to “wrap oneself in the flag,” and insofar as an industry is essential, the tariff is a dubious means of ensuring its survival. Economists say instead that essential industries ought to be given a direct subsidy to enable them to meet foreign competition, with explicit recognition of the fact that the subsidy is a price paid by the nation in order to maintain the industry for defense purposes.

Many demands for protection, whatever their surface argument may be, are really appeals to the autarkic feelings that prompted mercantilist reasoning. (Autarky is defined as the state of being self-sufficient at the level of the nation.) A proposal for the restriction of free international trade can be described as autarkic if it appeals to those half-submerged feelings that the citizens of the nation share a common welfare and common interests, whereas foreigners have no regard for such welfare and interests and might even be actively opposed to them. And it is quite true that a country that has become heavily involved in international trade has given hostages to fortune: a part of its industry has become dependent upon export markets for income and for employment. Any cutoff of these foreign markets (brought about by recession abroad, by the imposition of new tariffs by some foreign country, or by numerous other possible changes, such as the outbreak of war) would be acutely serious; and yet it would be a situation largely beyond the power of the domestic government involved to alter. Similarly, another part of domestic industry may rely on an inflow of imported raw materials, such as oil for fuel and power. Any restriction of these imports could have the most serious consequences. The vague threat implicit in such possibilities often results in a yearning for autarky, for national self-sufficiency, for a life free of dependence on the hazards of the outside world.

There is general agreement that no modern nation, regardless of how rich and varied its resources, could really practice self-sufficiency, and attempts in that direction could produce sharp drops in real income. Nevertheless, protectionist arguments—particularly those made “in the interests of national defense”—often draw heavily on the strength of such autarkic sentiments.

When a country imposes a tariff, foreign exporters have greater difficulty in selling their products. As their exports decline, they may cut prices in order to keep their sales from falling drastically. Thus, for example, when a tariff of $10.00 is imposed, foreign exporters may cut their price by, say, $6.00. The foreign exporter is being “taxed” when the tariff is imposed; the other $4.00 is reflected in a higher price to the consumer. The use of tariffs to tax foreign exporters in this way is known as the terms-of-trade argument for protection. The terms of trade represent the relative price of what a nation is exporting, compared with the price paid to foreigners for imported goods. When the price of what is being exported rises, or when the price paid to foreigners for imported goods falls (as it may when a nation imposes a tariff), terms of trade improve.

Governments may interfere with the processes of foreign trade for a reason quite different from those thus far discussed: shortage of foreign exchange (see international payment and exchange). Under the international monetary system established after World War II and in effect until the 1970s, most governments tried to maintain fixed exchange rates between their own currencies and those of other countries. Even if not absolutely fixed, the exchange rate was ordinarily allowed to fluctuate only within a narrow range of values.

If balance-of-payments difficulties arise and persist, a nation’s foreign exchange reserve runs low. In a crisis, the government may be forced to devalue the nation’s currency. But before being driven to this, it may try to redress the balance by restricting imports or encouraging exports, in much the old mercantilist fashion.

The problem of reserve shortages became acute for many countries during the 1960s. Although the total volume of international transactions had risen steadily, there was not a corresponding increase in the supply of international reserves. By 1973 payment imbalances led to an end of the system of fixed, or pegged, exchange rates and to a “floating” of most currencies. (See also gold standard; gold-exchange standard.)

Romney Robinson Paul Wonnacott