Trade Protectionism; Do They Actually Benefit Anyone?

Thats is, come closer, come closer

I've been rather intrigued, no, actually concerned. In the past month, I have been placing emphasis on reading policies set by other governments around the world on trade. Where some countries opt to free their markets further through FTA, others have been skewed more towards protectionist measures (based on Global Trade Alert). A paper done by Simon Evenett also questioned WTO's role in restraining protectionism; although I somewhat agree to the fact that WTO's role all this while seems to be focusing on liberalizing international markets, they should somehow place efforts in hastening their Trade Dispute Settlements, or create a clear guidance on the level of protectionism a country is allowed to take when attempting to protect national interests.

But another issue was also raised by Richard Baldwin is Murky Protectionism. What Baldwin discussed in his compilation paper was that certain countries (particularly developed ones) tend to create protectionist policies masquaraded as Green Policies under the guise of increasing quality standards or protecting the environment (under the pressure of their domestic contingencies). To be fair, their concerns on both national interests as well as increasing quality standards is justified however, what I believe is rather absurd is the timing as well as unnecessary clauses in their policies which would further increase costs to exporters and extend processing time (among others). Such policies would have a high probability result in companies passing the cost to consumers, further aggravating and dampening trade between nations.

In the globalized world we live in, vertical specialization has resulted regions, no, the world's production chain to be fully integrated. As explained briefly in his report, Richard Baldwin illustrated the supply chain for Hard Disk Drives, clearly showing how each part and componenet was derived from each of the ASEAN countries - from here we can infer that should one country implement a protectionist-skewed measure against any of the componenets, it would have drastic effect on other countries within the region due to the movement of parts and components. Putting all this aside, the main question still remains; do Trade Protectionist Policies actually benefit countries, companies, consumers or anyone in that matter?

Personally I don't.