Political economy of trade policy: the case of the late russian empire
- Autores: Marina Chuchko
- Directores de la Tesis: Markus Lampe (dir. tes.), Antonio Tena Junguito (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid ( España ) en 2019
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Florian Ploeckl (presid.), Jordi Domenech Feliu (secret.), Theocharis Grigoriadis (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Historia Económica por la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid y la Universidad de Barcelona
- Materias:
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- Resumen
The aim of the thesis is to study different aspects of the late Russian Empire’s trade policy of the late Russian Empire with focus on its determinants and formation process. ThisIt is the first study thatwhich examines econometrically the factors thatwhich defined the country’s tariff policy of the country in the 1890s, including study of the role which the business community played in the policy formation, and provides new trade data for the future research on the subject.
The thesis consists of three essays thatwhich address trade and trade policy of the late Russian Empire from different angles. The first essay aims to assess the accuracy of the official Russian official trade records between 1880 and 1913 using the double-test approach: comparison with the aggregated records of Russia’s major trade partners, and contrasting commodities prices in official statements with international benchmark prices. The attained results reveal the understatement bias of the Russian trade balance before 1898, when the new system of value estimation based on reference prices was introduced. The balance understatement comes mainly from substantial overvaluation of import prices for the respective period whereas official export figures are characterized by a relatively high accuracy. I reconstruct import series using the benchmark prices for the sample of commodities which constituted about 40% of total imports, and calculate a new trade balance. Changes introduced into the balance on current account (raschetnyi balans) by the adjustment of trade figures, improve previous estimates by Gregory (1979a), decreasing the annual average deficit for 1885-1897 from 43 to 14 million roubles, and thus, strengthening the Gregory’s judgement of Gregory on the substantial increase of net foreign investment in the post-Ggold Sstandard period. I also address the question raised by Gregory (1979a and 1979b) on the motivation of the Russian government to understate the trade surplus at a time when it was important to show financial stability to foreign partners in anticipation of the introduction of the GGold SStandard. I argue that the reluctance of the Russian authorities to re-evaluate trade series could be explained by the fiscal priorities— – the collection ofng increaseding customs revenue via raising import tariffs. The higher that official import values were, the smaller the ad valorem equivalent of the tariff looked becausesince the tariff was imposed on the weight of the imported commodities. High import values together with relatively smaller ad valorem tariffs allowed policy-makers to advocate for the necessity ofto increasinge tariff rates.
The second essay examines the determinants of the Russian trade policy using the case of ‘the Mendeleev’s Ttariff’ introduced in 1891. The choice of the 1891 tariff as a case study is determined by the fact that it became the foundation for all futurefurther trade agreements and defined Russia’s trade policy during the period of rapid industrialization and, effectively, until the outbreak of the First World War. Among contemporary policy-makers and scholars as well as economic historians there is no consensus on the motives and impact of the 1891 tariff reform. Despite the existing debate in the literature, any attempt atof empirical estimations of the factors thatwhich defined the 1891 tariff reform is missing. To examine the determinants of the Russian trade policy I use the Grossman & Helpman ‘“Protection for Sale’” Mmodel (1994) with the modifications applied by Gawande, et al. (2015), who extended the government’s objective function by including tariff revenue alongside with producers’ interests and consumers’ welfare. MyThe results confirm that tariff revenue collection was the government’s primary concern of the government during the 1891 tariff reform, leaving producers’ and consumers’ interest far behind. LThe result was also supported by the linear regression analysis, where the magnitude of the tariff change servedd as a dependent variable, also supports this result. Three variables appeared to be significant across all the specifications of the model: the value of customs revenues, their dynamic from 1885 to 1890, and the rates of the previous tariff. The first two variables are positively correlated with the tariff change, which supportings the idea that the Ministry of Finance was, to a large extent, concentrated on the customs revenue collection. . The tariff rates of the previous tariff are significantly and negatively correlated with new tariff rates, indicating the trend towards the convergence of the tariff rates.
In the second essay, I determined the overriding fiscal priorities of the Russian trade policy with the secondary importance of producers’ interest. However, the study of the archival tariff documentation revealed that the 1891 tariff was characterized by the participation of the business community at almost all stages of the tariff elaboration. of the country. Thus, the third essay of the thesis focuses on the role of representative business organizations in the process of the 1891 tariff formation. It addresses two major questions.: First,(i) wWhat, if any, was the contribution of business associations to the 1891 tariff formation of the 1891 tariff, if any? And, second,(ii) wWhich factors increased or /decreased the lobbying effectiveness? To answer these questions, I created a unique dataset on the 1891 tariff reform thatwhich allows the tracking of the tariff’s evolutionevolvement of the tariff from the initial duties to the final changes through all the suggested and/or adopted proposals made by the major actors of the tariff formation process, including regional business representative business institutions. I first use the methodology of dominance analysis to estimate the business’s contribution to the 1891 tariff formation relative to the contribution of other participatinged parties. The result demonstratesdetermines the major role played byof the Minister of Finance. The selected pool of experts occupies the second position. The contributionparticipation of the business associations is the least important, accounting for about 7% of the final tariff rates., Nnevertheless, this contributionit is extractable and notdistinct from negligible. Moreover, selected transcriptsstenography of the Tariff Commission meetings of the Tariff Commission and the decisions on certain commodities show that business representatives could have an impact on tariff formation. Linear regression analysis showed that lobbying was more successful in cases of more homogeneous proposals presented by the participatinged business associations. Moreover, the higher the share thatof an industry representedwas in a particular region’s the total production of a certain region,, the greater themore chance thes the business associations of this region would be successfulhad to succeed in lobbying for the tariff rates of the products belonging to the respective industry.
