This article reviews Adam Smith’s clearly articulated views about the desirability of free trade and his equally strong view on the necessity of sound institutions and ‘the tolerable administration of justice’ as key ingredients of successful economic management. It starts with Smith’s views on free trade and shows how pertinent they are to today’s high-level trade policy challenges. It then considers a more detailed day-to-day instrument of policy—the Trade Remedies Authority (TRA). Following Brexit, the TRA was created as an arms-length body for investigating cases for granting temporary import restrictions to specific products according to a reasonably well-defined objective process. The article demonstrates how, over the first 2 years of its life, the TRA has been reduced from a useful administrative instrument to a fig leaf for a political process for granting protection to petitioners. Unfortunately, this tendency to displace analytical approaches to policy by purely political ones can now be observed in many activities of UK governance.

This paper addresses the relationship between the development of the concepts of autarky and «economy of the extended space» in the German-speaking world and the framing of economic relations between Germany and Brazil in the 1930s. According to this «autarkic» way of conceiving economics, in order to thrive, an economy has to be autonomous regarding its supply of necessary inputs. Proposals presented in the Annual Reports transmitted to the German Foreign Office by German diplomatic representatives in Brazil encouraged, for example, the negotiation of bilateral trade agreements and the expansion of the Brazilian production of strategic inputs for Germany. The choice of Karl Ritter, an expert in economic matters, as ambassador to Brazil is also representative of this strategy.