Last night, I received an interesting email from my friend Dan Ikenson. Dan is a trade expert at the Cato Institute. He was reacting to my earlier post about a World Bank report that showed that in spite of the pledge by G-20 countries to stay away from protectionist measures many were put in place since October. He wrote:

I wanted to weigh in on a subject near and dear to my heart, about which you commented at The Corner. Yes, the World Bank reports that 17 of the G20 have resorted to some form of protectionism since pledging to avoid such measures. But, alas, the World Bank produced a hyped-up story, which the mainstream press predictably gobbled up.
Sure, we need to vigilantly guard against resurgent protectionism, but there has been much more hype than substance to the citations to protectionism. The World Bank didn’t attempt to qualify these measures, which amount to very little relative to the same 5 month period one year or two years earlier. My concern is that all of the references, to the same smallish doses of protectionism, create the illusion that the world is embracing protectionism. And that, in the end, makes it easier for policymakers to give in to their own domestic pressures for protectionism.
Here’s a link to a blog post (which I am updating with a more concrete analysis).
And here’s a Free Trade Bulletin attempting to put all of the hand wringing into perspective.
I know it’s our role to warn of the dangers of bad policy, but I think it’s also good to keep things in perspective.

Certainly, perspective is important. And I take Dan’s point (which is nicely presented and argued in the two pieces mentioned above) that these measures adopted are no worse — and in some cases even better — than what these countries were putting in place before the pledge. However, these guys remain big protectionists. Should we stop denouncing them?

A good question then might be whether being alarmist about protectionism (taxes, spending, or what have you) helps or hurts our cause? Dan thinks it will hurt us in the long run. I am not sure. What do you think?