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Hi, David here.

We're doing a new thing with the Briefing Room podcast, which is we're packaging up some bits

you may have heard before on other programmes, which are still very relevant, so they can

explain specific things that are going on in the world.

This week, Tariffs.

Donald Trump is in the White House and he warned in his inaugural address that the US will tariff and tax foreign countries

to enrich our citizens. So let's find out exactly what a tariff is and how they've been used in the

past. Here with me is Duncan Weldon, economist and author of 200 years of muddling through.

Duncan Weldon, what is a tariff?

I mean, the best way to think of a tariff is just to call it a tax.

A tariff is essentially a tax imposed on foreign goods as opposed to domestic goods.

And at what point is a tariff imposed? So a tariff is

imposed at the time that a good is imported. I mean, say that we have domestically produced cars

and foreign produced cars. The government could put a 20% tariff on foreign produced cars. So at

the time that a foreign car was imported into Britain, you know, there'd be a 20% tax on that.

Now, let's just go through a brief history of tariffs. Have they always existed? Have they always been popular, unpopular?

So if you go all the way back to sort of the early modern period, the 1600s, the 1700s, the 1700s, you know, governments at that time ran themselves generally with an

economic system that has come to be called mercantilism. And mercantilism was a belief that

exports were good for your country and imports were bad. Because if your country was importing

stuff, you were sending money, gold to foreigners to pay for them. The idea was you want to keep

imports out because imports aren't good for you. You can talk with the history of it, Britain

...