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How can protectionism and “free” trade succeed one another? Our answer focuses on the changing balance of private actors' political demands. These actors acquire interests in tariff policies because their assets are spatially concentrated, and trade in these assets is subject to various limitations. Actors in regions experiencing no new investment in an established industry (“old” regions) have interests that sometimes differ from those in regions where there is new investment. We show that old regions have no reason to be involved in tariff politics at business cycle peaks; during troughs, whether a state becomes more or less protectionist depends, ceteris paribus, on the relative political strength of old import-competing and old exporting interests. If old import-competing industries outweigh the old exporters, then protection will tend to increase at the trough and decrease at the peak of a business cycle; the opposite result occurs when old exporters are more influential.

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The paper deals with international trade in hazardous waste products when there is an international oligopoly market for waste, and both waste-importing and waste-exporting countries act strategically to utilize national environmental policies to attach rents arising from trade in waste. The authors model a multiple-stage game where waste is generated in an industrialized country as a byproduct of production, and potentially is exported to some less-developed countries, if not abated locally, or imposed on local residents at a cost of an environmental tax. In the market for waste, an oligopolistic supply is assumed. The demand for waste is perfectly competitive, with waste-processing firms guided by marginal disposal costs and environmental taxes levied by foreign countries. With each country playing Nash, the analysis finds domestic and foreign taxes to be distorted from the Pigouvian taxes in such a way that the domestic (waste-exporter) tax rate is set below, and the foreign tax rate is set above, the Pigouvian taxes. However, a global welfare optimum requires tax distortions in the opposite direction, in the sense that foreign environmental taxes must be set below the Pigouvian tax rate. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.