Welfare effects of trade policy interventions
Christopher Absell, post doctor in Economic History has received the Arthur H. Cole grant of the Economic History Association, which aids research in economic history. The funds are dedicated to his postdoctoral research project that examines the welfare effects of different types of trade policies, including tariffs, subsidies, and other defence measures.
Christopher Absell, who is post doctor in Economic History at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, is especially interested in the long-run effects of policy on welfare. For this reason, he has chosen to study the British sugar market in the 19th century.
- The British sugar market is interesting because Great Britain was the largest consumer of cane sugar in the world for most of the period and was subjected to a series of demarcated trade policy interventions that radically altered both consumer and producer welfare.
The project is motivated by the recent return to protectionism, most evident in the recent United States-China trade war and the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union.
The Cole grant will in part be dedicated to the extraction of the data underlying the project. This includes 87 years of monthly price and trade data from British newspapers. It will also be used to fund archival research in the British National Archives.
Title of the project: Welfare Effects of Trade Policy Instruments: evidence from the nineteenth century British sugar market.
More information about the Arthur H. Cole grant of the Economic History Association: https://eh.net/eha/grants-and-fellowships/