POLI 243 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Free Trade, Identity Politics
Document Summary
Canada being relatively abundant in land not capital and labour means land owners bene9it the most. You limit the trade agreement just to liberalize trade in agricultural goods. (most people + most voters in the country) Owners of scare factors of production prefer protection so they"re going to oppose liberalization of trade but these people are highly concentrated in the cities. It is a competition for seats (in canada) not the most votes. Sector-speci9ic arguments are developed by economists in the 1970s and 1980s to be applied in the 1990s, looking at sector based cleavages (sector vs sector industry vs industry). Looking at certain sectors, these are the ones who are going to want trade liberalization and it"s easy to focus on those. Sector speci9ic argument is different because ss predict an urban/rural split. Sector speci9ic gives more nuance, it says you can look at agricultural producers and you can make distinctions based on goods being produced in different scenarios.