Protectionism

🎯 How This Word Works in UPSC Writing

The shielding of domestic producers from foreign competition. The instruments extend well beyond tariffs and listing them is what completes an answer: quotas and other quantitative restrictions, subsidies to domestic producers, local content requirements, government procurement preferences, standards and certification used as barriers, and currency management. The political economy explains its persistence better than the economics does, since the benefits fall on a small identifiable group of producers who will organise to defend them while the costs are dispersed across consumers who each bear a little and none of whom will organise, so the pressure on any government is asymmetric regardless of the aggregate calculation. The legitimate cases are narrow and conditional: the infant industry argument holds only where protection is temporary and tied to performance, and strategic autonomy in defence or critical inputs is a security justification rather than an economic one, which is why it should be argued on that basis rather than smuggled in as economics.