NEW RELEASE: THE VERDICT ON TARIFFS

Tariffs are back at the center of American economic policy. This book asks the question the slogans avoid:

Do they actually work?

THE VERDICT ON TARIFFS: Who Pays, Who Wins, and What History Reveals by Bosco Mutarambirwa is now available in Kindle and paperback editions.

Most tariff debates collapse into two claims.

Tariffs raise prices.

Tariffs rebuild industry.

Both can be true.

Neither tells you whether a tariff succeeded.

THE VERDICT ON TARIFFS takes a different approach. It asks what the tariff was meant to accomplish, who ultimately bears the cost, whether domestic production expands, how businesses and consumers adjust, what trading partners do in response, and whether another policy could have achieved the same objective at lower cost.

The evidence spans more than two centuries of trade policy, including:

• nineteenth-century American protection
• Smoot-Hawley
• the postwar free-trade order
• Japan and South Korea's industrial rise
• China's emergence as a manufacturing power
• European trade barriers
• modern U.S. tariff episodes

At the center of the book is the Calibration Test, a practical framework for judging tariffs by their purpose, timing, economic incidence, domestic capacity, retaliation risk, downstream costs, investment effects, fiscal consequences, and exit conditions.

The question is not whether tariffs are always good or always bad.

The question is whether this tariff, at this rate, against this country, for this purpose, at this moment, actually produces the result policymakers promised.

That is the verdict this book sets out to reach.

No slogans. No automatic conclusions. No free passes.

THE VERDICT ON TARIFFS

Who Pays, Who Wins, and What History Reveals

Bosco Mutarambirwa

Published by Darwin Books

Available now

Kindle

Paperback

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