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Trade Blocs, Currency Blocs and the Disintegration of World Trade in the 1930s High quality books Trade Blocs, Currency Blocs and the Disintegration of World Trade in the 1930s By:Barry J. Eichengreen,Douglas A. Irwin Published on 1993 by The dramatic implosion and regionalization of international trade during the 1930s has often been blamed on the trade and foreign exchange policies that emerged in the interwar period. We provide new evidence on the impact of trade and currency blocs on trade flows from 1928 1938 that suggests a blanket indictment of interwar trade policies and payments arrangements is not warranted. Discriminatory trade policies and international monetary arrangements had neither a uniformly favorable nor unfavorable implication for world trade; instead the balance of trade-creating and trade-diverting effects depended on the motivations of policymakers and hence on the structure of their policies. We find, for example, that British Commonwealth tariff preferences af...