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Comment by arey_abhishek | Hacker News Reader

I'll add that America is the most protectionist country according to Credit Suisse: http://www.businessinsider.in/The-country-that-imposes-the-m... (Couldn't find link to original report)

Worked out well for America. Protectionist laws are a legitimate tool for social and economic progress.

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Your links cites a report that itself gets its numbers from the "Global Trade Alert," which is an org that aggregates a variety of trade-related actions published by the governments of each country. Only a fraction of these are actually related to governments being protectionist. A huge number of these "actions" appear to be petitions by companies inside a country for trade investigations against other companies or nations. Another big chunk appear to be listings of every law enacted that gives even a few million to some factory in a given nation. Not unsurprisingly, the aggregator just lists a bunch of state laws in the US.

The fact that America, with its very transparent political/legislative/corporate-grievances system would be recorded more often by this aggregator, is not surprising. In other words, this aggregator is going to be biased to record more trade-related events coming from more transparent nations that have more corporations located inside of them, and whose corporations will tend to try to resolve their trade disputes in the courts.

But I guess you couldn't be bothered to investigate the numbers when you could just cite BusinessInsider.

Argonaut, are you suggesting that the chart shows transparency of nations?? That's inferring a lot from one chart :) I don't think America is the most transparent country in the world.

Credit Suisse did the research and reported the chart+numbers.

From Global Trade Alert's website: 'Global Trade Alert provides real-time information on <i>state measures</i> taken during the current global downturn that are likely to affect foreign commerce.' It is not a list of petitions by companies.

Here's the original report from CS: https://doc.research-and-analytics.csfb.com/docView?document... appears on page 20)

And Trump is all about protectionism. If America wasn't the most protectionist country before, it certainly will be very soon.

America is in fact one of the most transparent nations on earth. [1] That includes the judiciary, presidency, congress, and law structure. The US Government and state governments publish vast amounts of information about their operations, studies, results, bills, spending, research, etc that is publicly available. The US routinely scores among the top few nations when it comes to making such data public.

It's also widely regarded as one of the least corrupt nations. [2] Transparency and low-corruption are two things that very frequently go hand-in-hand.

[1] http://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/transparency-full-...

"Denmark [the US came in #11] is the most transparent country, according to more than 8,000 informed elites from four different regions who filled out surveys for the 2016 Best Countries rankings. The rankings, formed in partnership with brand strategy firm BAV Consulting and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, aim to gauge global perceptions of the world's biggest economies in terms of specific attributes associated with countries."

On corruption the US is listed at #16 by transparency international, ahead of France and Japan, but behind Australia and the UK:

[2] http://www.transparency.org/cpi2015#results-table

Credit Suisse just copied the numbers from Global Trade Alert. Did you even look at the reports on the Global Trade Alert website? Or did you just read the "About" page?

Mentioning Trump is just FUD and indirection. You can mention him if he's elected and if he manages to enact protectionist policies.

Yes I did look through GTA's site and about us page. I looked at GTA and it's a highly respected research org. And CS is a very competent investment bank. So I do believe their research.

You are attacking a straw man. Find me another data source that refutes GTA and Credit Suisse.

Peace.

This is a terrible argument from authority. You didn't actually look at the GTA data, did you? I did, and most of it falls into the categories I outlined in my original comments.

Agreed. Friends use an up vote for this parent.

why is this downvoted ? I didn't read this as an endorsement to upvote but rather as witty response to @argonaut , unless i'm missing something else entirely here and the downvotes are warranted.

See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

Rallying the crowd for up-votes (even for another user's post) falls pretty much in the same ballpark.

like I said, I didn't read it as a rally for upvote, but rather a witty response to the previous comment. Unless he/she actually was rallying for upvotes and I read it wrong.

Thanks man. I have plenty of other stuff I used rally-ing up on ;-) next time all say 'well played' instead of up vote

This is the original Credit Suisse report:

The End of Globalization or a more Multipolar World?

https://doc.research-and-analytics.csfb.com/docView?document...

That chart at the top the _number_ of protectionist actions...

As in, Country A takes 2 actions that affects $1 in trade. Country B decides in 1 action that no imports are allowed. And so it concludes Country A is clearly more restrictive.

Does that conclusion seem correct to you? Don't you think you need more information than just that?

What is the evidence that Americans wouldn't be better off if there were less protectionism?

Protectionism shrinks markets, drives up prices, and reduces consumer choice. The decreased competition from protectionism also decreases technological development.

> Protectionist laws are a legitimate tool for social and economic progress.

Just not technological progress.

The auto manufacturers in the U.S. are a prime example of how protectionism stagnated industry development.

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