Not necessarily. Let say you are a large developing country and you want to bootstrap a domestic car industry. The first cars coming out will probably not be t

Not necessarily. Let say you are a large developing country and you want to bootstrap a domestic car industry. The first cars coming out will probably not be that great as you don't have the engineering knowledge or the experience building cars yet. Cars built by foreign companies are definitively better, and maybe cheaper to buy and/or to operate. If you do nothing, this new car industry would die quite soon. So you impose tariffs on foreign cars, that way your domestic production is protected, and you are able to make it grow and make it better. However be careful to not protect it too much, otherwise it will keep producing crappy cars looking like Trabant. With time you decrease the protection progressively. Another less abstract example is food, for instance, rice production and tariffs in Haiti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_production_in_Haiti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_production_in_Haiti