Starting from the deffinition of protectionism, an economic policy of restraining trade between states through methods such as tariffs on imported goods, restrictive quotas, and a variety of other government regulations designed to allow, according to proponents fair competition between imports and goods and service produced domestically, I am compelled to find Manoilescu’s vision of economy.
Was this system of political and economic measures of protection of national products from similar foreign products Manoilescu’s vision?
In the spirit of clasical protectionist doctrine, Manoilescu thought that the focal point of economy was the national economy, the sum of production assets and a conglomerate of individual traders. Amongst national production assets the foremost is the labour, capital and the others having only secondary importance in direct comparison.
After the great depression of 1929, his book, The theory of protectionism and international exchanges , was the basis for justifying protectionism in Brazil while in Romania he had to face hostility from authorities, making it impossible for him, even if for several months in 1931 he was the Governor of the National Bank, to apply his vision to end the economic crisis in Romania.
M. Manoilescu analyzed the state’s economic role and how this is reflected in modern economic science.
He saw the state as having the role of setting certain convergent common goals for the whole society and to set rules that removes free will in economic decisions, thus creating the premises for a regulated economic space, based on the transition from little rationale of firms to big rationale of national economy.
He demonstrated the necessity of state intervetionism, he has shared the conviction that through the alignment of the Romanian economic strategy to the one from the developed countries the lagging behind of Romania could be surpassed.
M. Manoilescu took the occidental type economic policies of the time, national and european corporatism as economic policy of internal relations between capital and labour and protectionism inside future Europe lead by Germany as international relations economic policy.