Effective protection and economic recovery in the United Kingdom during the 1930s
T he concept of effective protection has been used by Capie to analyse the effects of the tariff structure on the British economic recovery of the I930s.2 Although many of Capie's assumptions in calculating effective protection rates have been questioned on economic grounds3 the usefulness of the concept and Capie's empirical results are now well established and have been diffused to textbooks on the period.4 In this paper we show that Capie has imposed a highly restrictive arithmetic assumption on the calculations which invalidates the usefulness of his estimates. An effective protection rate Ej is usually defined as