We begin our econometric investigation by documenting a general counter-cyclical relationship between macroeconomic growth and import protection for the period covering the inception of the WTO in 1995 through 2010. For these emerging economies, a decrease in domestic real GDP growth or an increase in the domestic unemployment rate leads to significantly more imported products subject to TTBs in the subsequent year. Furthermore, real appreciation of the bilateral exchange rate relative to a trading partner is also associated with subsequently more import restrictions, as is weak foreign GDP growth in a trading partner. The relationships for these emerging economies during this particular period are similar to those found in a sample of five high-income economies over the longer period of 1989-2010 (Bown and Crowley, 2013a).<sup>5</sup> Nevertheless, these new results are particularly important in light of recent evidence from Rose (2013), which examines a number of other trade policy instruments (and a longer time series of data) and concludes that there has been a secular decline in the sensitivity of import protection across countries.<sup>6</sup> Rose’s paper concludes that protectionism is no longer counter-cyclical; however, it does not specifically address the manner by which countries have engaged in inter-temporal substitution of trade policy away from applied import tariffs and toward instruments such as temporary trade barriers.

The second half of our empirical analysis explicitly addresses the potential for trade policy substitution over time across instruments, and it also examines the role played by tariff commitments under the WTO beginning in 1995. Our formal approach is to extend our data sample back to 1989 and to compare how these emerging economies conducted their trade policies under both the GATT (pre-1995) and WTO (1995 onwards) regimes. We provide evidence that the increased responsiveness of TTBs to macroeconomic fluctuations after 1995 represents a significant departure from how the major emerging economies used these trade policy instruments before 1995, suggesting an 5 Bown and Crowley (2013a) examines data from the United States, European Union, Australia, Canada, and South Korea and is most closely related to a prior literature examining antidumping use by the United States and a handful of other high income countries on data from the 1980s and 1990s, including Knetter and Prusa (2003) and Feinberg (1989). One substantial difference is that while the current paper relies on the best available data across countries at the annual frequency, Bown and Crowley (2013a) was able to access data for high-income economies at the quarterly frequency. Another related paper is Crowley (2011), which is the first that we are aware of that highlights the channel of policy-imposing economies using country-specific bilateral import restrictions against trading partners that were experiencing negative growth shocks at home. Bown (2008) presents an approach that considers macroeconomic and industry-level determinants of antidumping for a number of the emerging economies in our sample for the period 1995-2002.

> 6 The evolving literature on import protection taking place during the Great Recession also includes Bussiere, Perez-Barreiro, Straub and Taglioni (2010), Kee, Neagu and Nicita (2013), Gawande, Hoekman, and Cue (2014), and Davis and Pelc (2012), in addition to Bown (2011).

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