Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 326 – the final page – of Arvind Panagariya’s remarkable 2019 volume, Free Trade and Prosperity:

In sum, if the devotees of protection want to persuade scholars to adopt their viewpoint and not mislead unsuspecting and innocent policymakers, they need to offer much more evidence in favor of their case. It will not suffice to offer half-baked arguments for infant industry protection, often relying on the post hoc fallacy, and point fingers at cases in which liberalization failed to deliver. If they insist that free trade advocates produce iron-clad evidence of a causal link between trade and growth, they must subject themselves to the same standard of proof. Or at least they must produce evidence that matches what free trade advocates have produced. To date they have not even come close to doing so.