Protectionism slows economic development, at the cost of lives and individual happiness. The Corn Laws and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act are examples of trade barriers that caused great harm to the UK and US economies. Today especially, when the growth of the global marketplace provides far more opportunities than were available in the past, countries that cut themselves off from the rest of the world are denying their citizens the best opportunities available for bettering their economic lot. Through the 1990s, those countries in Eastern Europe most open to international trade grew three times as fast as those that were not.