International institutions, MNCs, and protectionism during recessions

Today at the Monkey Cage blog, political scientist Soo Yeon Kim writes about the role of international institutions, national governments, and multinational firms for protectionist policies during the recent recession. In class, we're only about to get to read more about the rise of protectionism during "hard times", and what leads to protectionist policies such as the Smoot-Hawley Act from 1930. 

In her blogpost, Soo Yeon Kim asks a number of interesting questions and provides some food for thought for our class discussions. Two points I found particularly noteworthy:

• Protectionism in the 21st century comes not in the form of tariffs, or even non-tariff barriers, but in more indirect types of policies that are not (yet?) regulated by the global trade regime.
• Unlike in the 1920s and 1930s, and even in later periods, many firms today have been lobbying governments far less, if at all, for protectionist policies - because the chain of production today is so internationalized that multinational firms are quite likely to incur losses from protectionist policies.

She has also previously published a study in the Review of International Organizations (article; non-gated version) specifically on how international institutions prevented more substantial protectionist policies in the past five years.