Beggar-thy-neighbor

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    An economic policy that favors domestic interests at greater total cost to the economies of trading partners.

    "The traditional beggar-thy-neighbor view of older Keynesian models saw unilateral tariffs as having an expansionary effect on the domestic economy, due to their expenditure-switching effect, moving domestic demand away from foreign goods and towards domestic goods."

Synonyms

All synonyms
mercantilistprotectionist

Example

More examples

"The traditional beggar-thy-neighbor view of older Keynesian models saw unilateral tariffs as having an expansionary effect on the domestic economy, due to their expenditure-switching effect, moving domestic demand away from foreign goods and towards domestic goods."

Etymology

From beggar-my-neighbor (“a card game”).

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.