MORE ON THE STEEL TARIFF. A few weeks ago, I attended a steel industry technical session at which the presenter, an industry executive, noted that relatively few steel products qualified for the emergency tariff protection, which the industry maintained was provided for under the World Trade Organization code. That's the background to this Forbes article referring to the tariffs as "ineffective." (The industry trade association sees the tariff as effective and useful. Note that steel products are getting cheaper.) This Robert Samuelson column looks at the pros and cons of going against the international institutions for the sake of a steel business that has been undergoing restructuring for many years and for a number of reasons (one, the United States Steel Corporation was able to beat a monopolization case by noting that its market share had fallen over time, a phenomenon analyzed in a classic George Stigler article called "The Dominant Firm and the Inverted Umbrella," two, the major steel producers might have erroneously modernized some of their smaller works with small basic oxygen furnaces, and three some of the majors spent more resources figuring out that thin-slab casting would not work, rather than investigating ways to make it work, which it does.) An Institute for International Economics working paper (in .pdf) attempts to quantify the effect of retaliatory tariffs should the European Union take that action. Although we're not yet to Hawley-Smoot, the research ought to give pause.

Professor Drezner has been following this issue, where I found some of the material linked above, and he's got some supplemental reading on the policy wonk side.