Super 301 trade sanctions: An empirical investigation of the wood products case

In 1988, partly in response to a rapidly increasing trade deficit in the 1980s and declining exports. Congress made Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act "super" to pry open foreign markets. We assess the effectiveness of this new trade tool, dubbed Super 301, and show faults in the current methods used to judge the success of Super 301 trade agreements. The 1990 Wood Products agreement, which attempted to remove barriers in the Japanese wood products market, is a case in point. The U.S. forest products industry, driven both by the need to find new markets following European restrictions on wood imports from North America and the U.S. Log Export Ban prohibiting the export of raw logs from federal lands while allowing the export of the processed products of those logs, lobbied the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to open the Japanese processed wood market. We find that the Japanese market did open multilaterally, especially in Canada's favor. However, we see this as part of a continuing trend that began around 1984-1985 rather than the result of Super 301. The USTR, on the other hand, maintains that Japan has made little progress. The USTR's failure to recognize the multilateral opening stems from its narrow measure of success: U.S. performance in the Japanese wood market. © 1997 JAI Press Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

Duke Scholars

Author Edward Tower Economics