The Political Economy of Canada's Tariff Structure: An Alternative Model

Caves's recent imaginative attempt to test models of the process of Canadian tariff policy formation (Caves, 1976) concluded that an interest group approach had greater explanatory power than the alternatives he tested. His particular specification of such a model, however, is by no means the only plausible one. Indeed, Caves himself notes the many qualifications to which his results are subject. This paper tests an alternative interest group explanation of the Canadian tariff structure. The model differs from that of Caves in two major respects. In the first place it attempts to take certain international political influences into account as well as the purely Canadian ones. Secondly, it focuses upon a different set of explanatory variables from Caves's model even as far as domestic influences are concerned. Caves's analysis attempted to explain no more than the pattern of Canadian tariffs in a single year, 1963, since which there have been significant tariff changes. New data now available make it possible not only to update such studies of the Canadian tariff but also to analyse recent changes therein (Wilkinson and Norrie, 1975).