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National Review‘s John Puri is right: “We don’t need a strategic petroleum reserve.”

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal applauds the reality-signal now being broadcast by the bond market. Here’s its conclusion:

But overall the return to normal debt markets is a good development. U.S. debt held by the public at 100% of GDP is a problem, and on present trend it will get worse. Interest on the debt is now $1 trillion a year, more than the defense budget, and growing. Neither party in Washington is willing to reform the runaway entitlements that are driving the debt.

The bond vigilantes aren’t yet in full cry, but their early murmurs are welcome. They are sending a message to Washington and other Western nations to clean up their fiscal acts. Bond investors may be the only people who can force the politicians to pay attention. The real worry is if the politicians don’t listen.

GMU Econ alum Dave Hebert ponders trade-war strategies.. A slice:

But leverage is not measured by how large your market is. It’s measured by the other party’s next-best alternative. Every time Canada, Europe, Japan, or Britain signs a new trade agreement, that next-best option improves and lowers the cost of saying no to Washington.

This is what tariff strategists and their defenders keep missing. Tariffs can work as a negotiating tool only if two conditions are met. First, the other country must have something it can do to make the tariffs go away. Second, they must not have viable alternatives. If the rules and justifications for tariffs keep changing, if the list of demands keeps expanding and shifting, and if compliance today does not mean predictability going forward, the only rational response is diversification.

And that is exactly what the G7 have been doing.

But while Washington was raising tariff rates on friends and foes, the rest of the G7 has been busy signing new agreements around the world. In January, the European Union concluded its agreement with Mercosur, linking 700 million consumers and saving European firms €4 billion ($4.7 billion) per year in duties once it is fully in force. Shortly thereafter, the EU finished a free-trade agreement with India, which will cut Indian tariffs on 96.6 percent of EU exports.  And in March, the EU completed another deal with Australia and signed a security and defense partnership on top.

Jim Bacchus describes other countries’ diversifying their trade away from the U.S. as “the other Liberation Day.” Two slices:

As the United States under President Donald Trump endeavors to coerce international trading partners through the employment of economic leverage to address both its trade and non-trade concerns, those trading partners, more and more, are simply circumventing the United States.

…..

In all this, and much more, the current transformation of international trade positions the United States on the outside looking in—and likely to watch its already-middling share of global exports shrink even more in the years ahead. US trade policy has increasingly turned the country from a paragon of international trade into a pariah and a market to be avoided, if at all possible. The distinguished international trade economist Robert Lawrence has asserted that President Trump’s trade policies are helping “create a world without America.” This stark assertion may edge a bit toward exaggeration, though less and less so as time passes. What can be stated with increasing certainty is that the protectionist trade policies of Donald Trump, ever in flux, are making it less likely that archaeologists 5,000 years from now will identify the geographical center of 21st-century world trade as being in the United States. To avoid this fate, the US must return to its long-standing policy of freeing trade and establishing and upholding the international rule of law in trade. This should be done through regional agreements, if need be, but preferably within the multilateral legal structure of the World Trade Organization, a vital international institution for which President Trump has so far expressed only contempt.

David Henderson, writing in the Wall Street Journal, makes a powerful case that “California’s wealth tax would spare no one.” A slice:

We’ve seen this before. After the 16th Amendment authorized the federal income tax, it started small. In 1913 the tax rate on married couples filing jointly was 1% on income up to $20,000 (equivalent to some $674,000 today). The top rate was 7%, on income above $500,000 ($16.8 million today). Five years later, in the midst of World War I, the rate was 6% on income up to $4,000 and 77% on incomes over $1 million.

Under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, and with the urging of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, Congress brought rates down substantially at all income levels. But the lowest level they reached, in 1928, was still much higher than in 1913: 25% for incomes over $100,000, and 1.5% to 9% on income up to $20,000.

Then World War II brought higher rates again at all levels. Tax rates on lower incomes were high: 23% on income up to $2,000. Before World War II, the income tax was thought of as the class tax—a high tax on high-income people. In World War II, it became a mass tax.

There’s a lesson here. If you vote for a measure to tax the very wealthy, you might find yourself paying rates even above those meant for the very wealthy. Proposition 40 has the potential to become a stealth tax on all Californians.

Reviewing Unconventional Education and America’s Founding, edited by Nasiyah Isra-Ul at the Foundation for Economic Education, Laura Williams offers much-needed wisdom about education in the U.S.

Let’s hope that Christian Britschgi is correct when he argues that data centers will be saved by federalism…. And perhaps he is!

Here’s the abstract of a new paper by J. Carter Braxton, Kyle Herkenhoff, Chengdai Huang, Michael Nattinger, Jonathan L. Rothbaum, and Lawrence D.W. Schmidt:

We document an increase in U.S. income risk from 1969 to 2019 using newly digitized IRS tax returns, distinguishing permanent from transitory risk. Since the 1970s, permanent income risk increased across the distribution, but most sharply among high earners, rising nearly 70% among the top 5%. We show that, even among top earners, large negative income shocks strongly predict financial distress and higher income risk is linked with higher savings. In a quantitative life-cycle model, rising income risk concentrated at the top lowers the risk-free rate by 0.7pp, increases wealth inequality, and contributes to the “savings glut of the rich.”

Jeffrey Williamson has died.

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… is from page 12 of Thomas Sowell’s 1993 book, Inside American Education (footnotes deleted):

An international look at per-pupil expenditures likewise gives the lie to claims that more money produces better education. Despite claims that money is needed to hire more teachers to relieve “overcrowded classrooms,” the United States already has a smaller average class size than a number of countries whose educational achievements are higher. Japan, for example, averages 41 students per class, compared to 26 for the United States. In mathematics, where the performance gap is especially glaring, the average class size in Japan is 43, compared to 20 in the U.S. Within the United States, the ratio of pupils to teachers declined throughout the entire era from the 1960s to the 1980s, when test scores were also declining.

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Here’s a letter to Foreign Affairs.

Editor:

Michael Pettis continues to stir up unwarranted fear of “trade imbalances” (“A Great Rebalancing Is Coming,” August 28). Although the global economy is indeed beset by government-created flaws destined to cause problems, so-called “trade imbalances,” as such, are not among these flaws. The fact that Mr. Pettis insists otherwise reflects his failure to understand that countries that run trade deficits do not thereby necessarily go further into debt, and that the capital stock can and does grow both for the world and for many trade-deficit countries, including the U.S. When a country, such as the U.S., regularly attracts foreign investment mostly to create and enhance enterprises in that country – rather than to fund consumption – that country’s productivity and prosperity grow even as it continues to run “trade deficits.” There’s no reason this process must ever end or be anything other than enriching for the people of the country.

But Mr. Pettis doesn’t get it. He stumbles immediately by writing that “for an advanced, capital-rich economy such as that of the United States, an enduring trade deficit will bring with it either rising unemployment or rising debt, neither of which is sustainable.”

Well.

The U.S. has run annual trade deficits every year, without fail, starting in 1976 – that is, for 20 percent of the country’s existence. And yet the U.S. unemployment rate is today 4.1% – less than half its rate of 8.5% in 1975 (the last year the U.S. ran an annual trade surplus).

As for debt, while it’s gone up in total, it’s gone down relative to the value of assets owned by American households – which is the relationship that matters for assessments of the sustainability of debt. At the end of 2025, the average net worth of an American household was $1,034,665. This figure includes each household’s share of federal, state, and local government debt. In inflation-adjusted terms, that’s a net worth 205% higher than in 1975.*

And, by the way, so too has the real net worth of the median American household risen. The economist Jeremy Horpedahl calculates that the real net worth of the median U.S. household in 2022 was 119% higher than in 1983 and 171% higher than in 1969.**

These facts alone belie Mr. Pettis’s belief that trade deficits necessarily drain wealth from countries that run these so-called “deficits.”

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* To calculate this figure I updated the figures I reported in this March 19^th, 2026 Café Hayek post.

** Private correspondence from Horpedahl. These figures will appear, with appropriate references and citations, in Bryan Caplan’s and my forthcoming book, Blockade: The Science and Ethics of Trade (Cato Institute, 2027).

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The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board decries the unwarranted hysteria over data centers. A slice:

It’s true the AI industry has hurt its own cause by fueling speculative anxiety about mass unemployment. AI developers have also failed to explain how data centers benefit local communities. But the larger failure has been the lack of political leadership in explaining the technological and economic transition now underway and how to address it.

On data centers, there’s a strong case to be made. The U.S. has more than 5,400 data centers, which are the backbone of the internet and power the apps on your smartphone. Data centers enable Zoom meetings, online food deliveries, video streaming, instant retail stock trading and more. If data centers went dark, so would the modern economy.

New large-scale data centers are needed to train and run AI models, and more than chatbots. Businesses large and small use AI to boost productivity, which lets them pay workers more. Steel maker Cleveland-Cliffs recently announced an upgrade to an Ohio plant that will incorporate AI to improve efficiency.

Utilities use AI to prepare for natural disasters and reduce power outages. AI models are helping diagnose cancer at earlier stages and develop cures. Data centers bring high-paying construction jobs, and skilled blue-collar workers are needed to run them.

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board continues to warn of the ill consequences of the U.S. government’s fiscal incontinence. A slice:

Politicians need to take their obligations to bondholders seriously because they won’t be able to do anything else if they don’t. A hugely indebted government can spend only at the pleasure of its lenders. As interest costs crowd out spending on the essential stuff that government is supposed to do, voters will become increasingly upset as they sense that their taxes aren’t being spent for their benefit.

Debt can be sensible. When private borrowers take on debt, they are mostly doing it to fund an investment. They hope the investment will create a return that exceeds the costs of borrowing. And then when the debt is paid back, a beneficial, productive asset remains.

Some U.S. government borrowing is like that, when funding infrastructure projects or education. But the vast majority of federal borrowing funds short-term consumption, primarily for seniors, over long-term investment.

The government’s “return” on such short-term spending is negligible, and the money it must borrow to fund those expenditures is money that cannot be borrowed by private individuals or businesses to make productive investments.

That hurts economic growth, which hurts job growth, which hurts household incomes, which fuels political demand for more welfare programs to help people who are struggling, which will require even more debt, which borrowers won’t be willing to lend unless interest rates are higher.

GMU Econ alum Romina Boccia and her co-autho Ritvik Thakur tell a scary but true story about Medicare.

Peter Earle explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless does – need explaining: “By suppressing yield signals, bond bureaucrats may summon the very bond vigilantes they hope to suppress.”

Stephanie Slade criticizes “the postliberal right’s frenzy for exaggerating and fabricating transgressions.”

Eric Boehm describes Trump’s trade war with Canada as “costly, absurd, and unfunny.” Two slices:

As the Trump administration escalated its trade war with Canada last week, the White House’s official Twitter account shared a photo of a bald eagle tackling a Canadian goose.

The intended message was not exactly a subtle one.

But the post did illustrate how the administration views America’s economic relationship with Canada, and how President Donald Trump thinks about international trade more broadly: as a win-or-lose struggle in which America must bully its trading partners and fight its allies, lest they keep “ripping us off.”

That logic completely unravels if you think about it for more than a minute. American consumers and businesses are being taken advantage of by Canadians who…are offering to sell us aluminum, oil, and wood while buying our farm goods, machinery, and ethanol? Americans and Canadians trade hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods every year in voluntary, mutually beneficial transactions.

But Trump doesn’t want to think about it for more than a minute. He wants a fight for the sake of a fight, and the details don’t matter.

…..

The mistake there may be in assuming that Trump wants a deal at all. There is little indication that he does.

At one point during recent negotiations, The New York Times reported, American officials said the U.S. “would retain the power to change tariff policy against Canada at any time, irrespective of the agreement.”

What good is a deal that’s subject to be changed at whim? It’s hard to blame Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney for rejecting that ridiculous proposal.

Even before that, Carney had good reason to be distrustful. After all, the two countries had a deal—the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), which Trump negotiated and hailed as “the best agreement we’ve ever made” during his first term.

Trump decided to tear up that deal because he wants a fight—even a nonsensical one that will harm American consumers and businesses—more than he wants trade with Canada. (By retaliating against Trump’s foolishness, Canada is compounding the error. As J.D. Tuccille wrote last week, Canada ought to pursue a policy of unilateral free trade, rather than hurting its own people in a showdown with Trump.)

Also critical of Trump’s trade war with Canada is Ramesh Ponnuru, calling it “multifaceted stupidity.” Two slices:

The trade war weakens the United States in relation to China. Optimists believe Trump is trying to force Canada to adopt its own stringent tariffs against China. Even if that were the right tool for an international coalition to use to weaken the Chinese government or improve its behavior, simultaneously attacking Canada over everything from its dairy policy to its existence as an independent nation is no way to build that coalition. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s musings about drawing closer to Beijing may not be wise, but they are predictable.

…..

The trade war is increasingly based on absurd complaints. Canada maintains some protectionist policies that harm American producers (and Canadian consumers), much as the U.S. engages in some protectionism against Canadian businesses. Yet the two nations largely practice free trade with one another. Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute calculates that 99.85 percent of cross-border trade was duty-free before Trump started his trade war. The president called his first-term deal with Canada and Mexico “the largest, fairest, most balanced, and modern trade agreement ever achieved.”

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… is from page 117 of Robert Bork’s brilliant 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox:

There is no body of knowledge other than conventional price theory that can serve as a guide to the effects of business behavior upon consumer welfare. To abandon economic theory is to abandon the possibility of a rational antitrust law.

DBx: Yes, but I would go even further than Bork. First, conventional price theory – which I so very much admire and respect – should be supplemented with the Austrian theory of entrepreneurship and market rivalry. Second, when it’s appropriately applied, the resulting price theory reveals that the only rational antitrust law is no antitrust law.

Nevertheless, Bork is correct to insist that if there is to be antirust legislation, the damage that it will do to the economy will be kept to a minimum only if it is guided by sound economic price theory.

…..

Pictured here is the greatest textbook ever written on price theory.

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Bob Higgs remembers his former student, Charlotte Twight. A slice:

Charlotte’s work was marked by careful attention to detail and documentation of evidence. Here her legal training continued to serve her well, even though she was not a practicing lawyer. Her prose was clear and careful. Her conclusions were advanced confidently, as well they should have been in light of the strong arguments and evidence she adduced.

DBx: Charlotte Twight will indeed be missed. I did not know her well; I met her on only two or three occasions. One of these stands out in my memory with special vividness. It was an event – exactly where and when I’ve now forgotten (likely an APEE meeting sometime in the mid or late 1990s) – at which Charlotte enticed Gordon Tullock onto a dance floor. She commenced to dance with a man who likely had never before ever done such a thing. My memory is that Gordon seemed to have appreciated, and perhaps even enjoyed, the experience – and the onlookers, including me, marveled at Charlotte’s charming gambol with Gordon.

Pointing out that “Trump’s tariffs aren’t reducing the trade deficit,” the Washington Post‘s Editorial Board explains that “elevating this pointless statistic to the level of a national emergency never made any sense.” Two slices:

The trade deficit doesn’t matter, but even if it did, tariffs aren’t an effective way to reduce it.

In July, the monthly trade deficit in goods hit its highest level since March 2025, the Commerce Department revealed on Thursday. That was the month before President Donald Trump’s announcement last year of massive tariffs on products from nearly every country in the world.

…..

Intuition suggests tariffs could bring down the trade deficit. Tariffs are a tax on imported goods, and taxing something more means people will buy less of it. Fewer imports with the same amount of exports would therefore lower the trade deficit.

Absurdly, the Trump administration simultaneously claims that tariffs aren’t taxes and don’t raise prices.

The problem for the Trump team is that imports and exports often move together. In other words, reducing imports also reduces exports, so the difference between them — the trade deficit — hardly changes.

Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady calls Canada “Trump’s Great White Whale.” Two slices:

Mr. Trump has done serious damage to U.S. credibility by picking a senseless fight with a neighbor, ally and important trade partner. For decades Washington has used trade agreements to help American farmers and manufacturers gain access to foreign markets, to develop international supply chains that boost competitiveness, and to enhance consumer choice and affordability. If those agreements can be abrogated unilaterally by the commander in chief, who’s going to trust Uncle Sam?

Mr. Trump didn’t like the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. In 2020 he replaced it with his own U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Now he doesn’t like that. He’s desperate to blow it up but needs someone to blame.

The U.S. president says Canada is the worst country on earth when it comes to negotiating trade. Translation: It’s a little democracy that won’t knuckle under to his second-term tariff hikes. This is hurtful to a frail ego. It can’t go unanswered.

…..

It’s left to the American business community to explain to Mr. Trump the harm he’s doing and that his obsession with the trade deficit with Canada, caused by energy imports, is misplaced. If that message gets across, there’s hope. Until then, Mr. Carney might want to thank Mr. Trump for the political assist.

“Canada trade war a fig leaf for Trump’s absurd trade policy.” (HT Scott Lincicome)

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal rightly criticizes Trump’s newly announced ‘deal’ for the U.S. to grab oil from Venezuela. A slice:

Official details of the agreement are scarce, but the facts reported by the Journal over the weekend aren’t cause for enthusiasm. The U.S. will take a 35% stake in a private company run by Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan businessman close to Ms. [Delcy] Rodríguez. The Betancourt firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, will be able to develop those 65 billion in reserves, and the U.S. will have preferential rights to 20% of what the firm produces at the cost of production.

The U.S. investor here will be the Pentagon, of all agencies, which will structure the investment through penny warrants that will gain the equity stake without taxpayer cash. The legal authority for this is far from clear, since the Defense Department is investing in a foreign entity. Can the Pentagon Office of Strategic Capital take such equity stakes?

Why is the Pentagon even playing in global oil markets when it has enough to do buying new weapons in short supply and reforming its broken procurement process? The global oil market is under stress from the Iran war, but by and large it does a good job of matching supply and demand.

Venezuela produces only about 1.1 million barrels of oil a day now, and deep wells in Guyana and new investment in Argentine shale (including by U.S. entrepreneur Harold Hamm) are coming in the Americas. Venezuelan production will take years to ramp up.

Who will finance this oil production and which companies will invest to extract it? Mr. Trump has been pleading with U.S. oil firms to invest on their own in Venezuela since he snatched President Nicolás Maduro in January. But most say the government hasn’t provided the right legal or contractual protections. Chevron is a long-time player in the country.

The politics of all this are even more complicated, to put it mildly. The U.S. government is essentially getting in bed with a foreign dictator and her favored capitalist. Any foreign firm that invests will have all three as de facto partners, but Mr. Trump will be out of office in 2029 and the heavy-handed U.S. role might not play well over time in Caracas.

Phil Magness talks with Jeremiah Johnson about, among other things, J.D. Vance’s clueless attack on economics.

When will Californians tire of their officious, harmful government?

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… is from page 3 of Thomas Sowell’s 2012 monograph, “Trickle Down” Theory and “Tax Cuts for the Rich” (original emphasis):

What actually followed the cuts in tax rates in the 1920s were rising output, rising employment to produce that output, rising incomes as a result and rising tax revenues for the government because of the rising incomes, even though the tax rates had been lowered. Another consequence was that people in higher income brackets not only paid a larger total amount of taxes, but a higher percentage of all taxes, after what have been called “tax cuts for the rich.” There were somewhat similar results in later years after high tax rates were cut during the John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. After the 1920s tax cuts, it was not simply that investors’ incomes rose but that this was now taxable income, since the lower tax rates made it profitable for investors to get higher returns by investing outside of tax shelters.

The facts are unmistakably plain, for those who bother to check the facts. The federal income tax rate on the highest incomes in 1920 was 73 percent. By 1928, the highest income tax rate had been reduced to 25 percent. Between those two years, the total amount of income tax revenue collected increased, and the proportion of all income taxes collected from people earning a million dollars or more per year also increased, from less than 5 percent in 1920 to 15.9 percent in 1928.

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Here’s a response to a different commenter at my Facebook page.

Mr. Martin:

In response to my Facebook post critical of Trump’s protectionism, you write that Trump’s policies create great harm for Canada but are a mere “inconvenience” for us Americans.

Why should we be pleased with, or even indifferent to, any hardships that our government inflicts on Canadians? Even from a selfish perspective, what do we gain from their suffering? Indeed, economics tells us that we lose from their economic suffering. (Would you prefer that your neighbors be productive and wealthy, or unproductive and poor?)

You’ll point out – as you do in your comment – that Trump’s policies have induced several companies to move their investments from Canada to the U.S. And you obviously presume that these investments are good for Americans. But you’re mistaken.

Investments made in the U.S. rather than abroad only because U.S. protectionism prompted these investments in the U.S. harms most Americans in at least two ways.

First, we Americans will pay for the outputs of these U.S.-based facilities prices that are higher than we would have paid for the same outputs had these investments remained in Canada, for Canada is where the market revealed these outputs can be produced at lowest cost.

Second, these tariff-induced investments in the U.S. aren’t free. They use land, resources, and workers in the U.S. that would otherwise be used to produce not only other outputs, but other outputs that these resources can produce at a comparative advantage. But because of Trump’s protectionism, these other investment and employment opportunities in the U.S. are squelched, and these other outputs aren’t produced in the U.S. Put differently, these tariff-induced investments pull resources and labor in the U.S. out of more-productive and into less-productive channels. The fact that a similar inefficiency of resource use is caused also in Canada does nothing to diminish the economic harm suffered by Americans.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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Here’s a note to a commenter at my Facebook page.

Ms. Rachel Mills

Ms. Mills:

To my Facebook post ridiculing Trump’s latest punitive taxes – a.k.a. tariffs – on Americans’ purchases of goods from Canada, you offer this comment: “Our starting point in this is not free trade to trade war and protectionism. The starting point was already tariffs and protectionism and shenanigans. The end point might be free-er trade though.” You close by writing that “Trump is playing a game,” by which I take you to mean that Trump is strategically using U.S. tariffs to lower tariffs globally.

For several reasons, I believe you to be mistaken.

First, from Adam Smith and Frédéric Bastiat centuries ago to Phil Gramm and Doug Irwin today, all informed advocates of free trade have repeatedly explained that the best trade policy for the home country is free trade regardless of the policies of other countries. While free traders recognize that the ideal world is one in which complete free trade is universal, they also recognize that, as a practical matter, such a world has never existed and will never exist, and so the best that each government can do is to leave its own citizens free to trade even when other governments abuse their citizens with protectionist restrictions.

The claim that free trade at home requires free trade abroad is made only by protectionists; it has never been made by informed free traders.

Second, while trade wasn’t completely free when Trump took office in 2017, it was darn close. I had ChatGPT construct the graph below, from data assembled by Julia Estefania-Flores, Davide Furceri, Swarnali Hannan, Jonathan Ostry, and Andrew Rose, showing changes over time in global trade restrictiveness.* As you can see, when Trump unilaterally began jacking up U.S. tariffs in 2018, world trade was largely free by historical standards and still becoming more free (if at a slower pace than before the early 1990s).

Third, Trump’s own decades-long pronouncements about trade make abundantly clear that he neither likes nor understands trade. After all, he scribbled in the notes of a speech “TRADE IS BAD,” and proudly calling himself “Tariff Man,” he has consistently asserted that so-called U.S. “trade deficits” with individual countries are evidence that these countries are ‘raiding’ the U.S. to steal our wealth. Despite the fact that bilateral trade deficits are utterly without economic significance, these phenomena nevertheless serve as the ridiculous justifications for Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.

Trump’s comprehension of trade is akin to a flat-earther’s comprehension of astronomy. No one with such a preposterously poor understanding of trade should be presumed to be playing a long game aimed at making trade more free.

In short, there is no excusing Trump’s protectionist folly.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* A Measurement of Aggregate Trade Restrictions and Their Economic Effects (World Bank, 2022).