What the free marketeers constantly decide wrongly on is an index on the number of regulations to decide whether a country has "good" or "bad" economic policies. Regulations aren't inherently good or bad, in my opinion. They are what they are, and there are good ones and bad ones. Regulating natural monopolies, like, for example, utility companies, on prices and quality is a necessity, because, otherwise, they'll game the market and rape consumers.
However, regulating how many cars Toyota can ship to the American market is, in my opinion, incredibly stupid, because it artificially increases the price of a Camry and allows shitty companies like GM -- which can't innovate and is going to royally screw its employees -- to remain alive while punishing Toyota for being a better company with better products. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
I often feel that the neo-lib hallucinations in economics are rooted in an attempt to make conclusions from numbers alone.
(Now who can be the mystery user who was Number 5 signing on to ET? Numéro, hey? French?)
I fully agree on these indices, which OECD go in for a great deal. They're mostly aimed at handing out lessons in an oversimplified way. It's just funny when one of them turns against its master, that's all.
As for quotas, your Toyota/GM example is, not exactly extreme, but a fairly obvious one. Ideally, quotas should give the home industry breathing-space to adapt and become competitive with the imports. I think that has happened to some extent in Europe (though there's a way to go yet for Renault and Peugeot, for example, compared to Toyota and Honda). I don't support the British (Thatcherian) choice of abandoning the national industry to its sort (with the result that there's nothing left of it). And I'm not sure the sogginess and lack of fight of GM and Ford can entirely be ascribed to shielding by import quotas.
