Can Emerging Market Protectionism Be Beneficial?

Abstract

This paper employs a sequential trade competition model to analyze differential trade effects on an emerging market. We find that free trade is not able to alter the ex post dominance of the foreign incumbents and, conversely, emerging market protectionism will reduce the dominance, and the total world welfare will not be worse off. We also find that a strong import dependency even with competitive domestic production exists in the emerging market unless the foreign competitors are few in number.