Japanese Import Tariffs

As I show in Prin. of Micro, per unit tariffs (and tariffs in general) are economically welfare reducing, meaning that tariffs make society economically worse off.  Here is a recent article from The Wall Street Journal about current Japanese agricultural import tariffs.  Notice in the article (and the graphic) that import tariffs range from 38.5% on beef, 218% on powdered skim milk, 252% on wheat, 256% on barley, 328% on sugar and 360% on butter and a whopping 778% on rice.

As a result, Japanese consumers are much more worse off than the gains to Japanese producers (which now account for on 2% of the total population).