Tariff pass-through and the distributional effects of trade liberalization

This paper estimates the distribution of welfare gains due to the trade reforms in India by simultaneously considering the effect on prices of tradable goods and wages. The cost of consumption for each household is affected by the domestic price changes, while wage incomes adjust to these price changes in equilibrium. Three rounds of the Indian Employment and Consumption Surveys are used for the analysis. The price transmission mechanisms are estimated for both rural and urban areas to understand the extent to which the trade reforms are able to affect the domestic prices. In order to assess the distributional effects, a series of nonparametric local linear regressions are estimated. The findings show that households at all per capita expenditure levels had experienced gains as a result of the trade liberalization, while the average effect was generally pro-poor and varied significantly across the per capita expenditure spectrum.     

Equity,efficiency, and the structure of indirect taxation

Optimal tax formulae are derived and optimal tax rates calculated for the case where there are many consumers, an income tax is impossible and the government has to trade off efficiency in order to improve the real distribution of income. Consistent aggregation assumptions are used to permit the derivation of simple tax rules depending only on the behaviour of the average consumer and of a socially representative consumer. Calculations for the U.K. in 1972 show how subsidies and taxes vary with the government's revenue requirement and with the degree of egalitarianism in the social welfare function.     

The Loss from Trade under International Cournot Oligopoly with Cost Asymmetry

This paper examines the efficiency and welfare effects of intra‐industry trade in the presence of imperfect competition and heterogeneous technologies. We show that when a Southern country has a relatively less concentrated industry and faces low demand, the output of the Northern country may contract after initiating trade. Production inefficiencies can outweigh the gain effected by trade‐induced competition and lower price in trade, resulting in a net loss in the global welfare. In some circumstances, voluntary technology transfer, managed trade through VERs, or the introduction of a tariff can improve both trading partners' welfare.     

Foreign Aid,Wage Inequality,and Welfare for a Small Open Economy with Tourism

While the welfare effect of foreign aid has been extensively analyzed, the impact on the distribution of income has received less attention. At the same time, there has been recent work on tourism where it is complementary to aid in improving welfare. By combining these two strands, this paper concentrates on wage inequality in developing countries. We find that an increase in aid in the form of tied aid can lower the relative price of nontraded goods. The rent extracted from tourists declines, reducing welfare of domestic residents. In addition, the fall in the nontradable price can widen the wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers. Thus, increased foreign aid may have detrimental effects on national welfare and the distribution of income. Rising wage inequality is confirmed by numerical simulations.     

Consumer welfare effects of increased food and energy prices

In this study, the authors evaluated how much price changes in food and energy – two basic living expenditures competing for consumers’ budgets – would affect consumer welfare. We first estimated a US complete demand system to quantify the interdependent demand relationships among 11 categories of consumption expenditures. Among the estimates, the own price elasticities of both food and energy are relatively inelastic, a finding that explains the dynamics of the recent soaring food and energy prices. The estimated demand elasticities were then incorporated into the measurement of Hicksian compensating variation to analyse the consumer welfare effects of price changes in food and energy. The results indicated that an increase in food and energy prices would increase compensated expenditures or incur a substantial consumer welfare loss, creating an especially heavy burden for low income households.     

Trade Liberalization and Welfare Inequality: A Demand‐Based Approach*

There is strong evidence suggesting that different income groups consume different bundles of goods. Hence, trade liberalization can affect welfare inequality via changes in the relative prices of goods consumed by different income groups (the price effect). In this paper, I develop a framework that enables us to explore the role of the price effect in determining welfare inequality. I find that trade liberalization does benefit some income classes more than others. In particular, I show that the relative welfare of the rich with respect to that of the poor has a hump shape as a function of trade costs.     

Why Free Trade May Hurt Developing Countries

This paper builds a general equilibrium trade model where a country produces two traded goods and one nontraded public consumption good. The government finances the provision of the public good by taxing the incomes of factors of production, and/or by imposing tariffs. Within this framework, the paper (i) shows that a small tariff or an income tax improves the country's welfare if there is an undersupply of public good, and (ii) identifies the circumstances in which an improvement in the country's terms of trade may reduce its welfare, and free trade can be inferior to autarky. A terms of trade improvement, or the movement from autarky to free trade, definitely improves the country's welfare if the government imposes a tariff that leaves the domestic relative price of the imported good unchanged.     

Trade liberalization and the Labor Market Revisited

This paper provides new insights in understanding the adjustments of the labor market to trade liberalization policies in an economy producing tradeables and nontradeables. The results of the paper indicate that the short-run effects of trade liberalization on wages, labor allocation and worker welfare is contingent on certain explicit production and demand conditions that exist in an economy. The production condition is related to the slope of the labor demand curve in a given economy and the demand condition is related to the difference in the cross-price elasticity of demand of nontradeables to the price of importables and exportables. The necessary combination of these conditions needed for trade liberalization to be welfare improving in the short run is explored.     

Rigid Wage,Factor Immobility and Immiserizing Growth*

In the theory of trade and growth, Bhagwati made an interesting contribution by demonstrating the proposition that growth can be welfare reducing even at constant terms of trade, whenever distortions obtain in an economic system. Batra-Scully strengthened the Bhagwati thesis and derived the conditions for growth to be immiserizing at improved terms of trade in the presence of a wage differential. In the present analysis, we show that economic expansion in a country which is characterized by factor immobility and/or factor price rigidity may not reduce the country's real income at constant or improved terms of trade. Specifically, the Bhagwati theorem, and its stronger version proposed by Batra-Scully, hold for an economy with a rigidity in factor price whether or not accompanied by factor immobility. However, growth will not lower welfare at constant or improved terms of trade if factor immobility is the only imperfection existing in the factor market.     

TOURISM,DUTCH DISEASE AND WELFARE IN AN OPEN DYNAMIC ECONOMY*

This paper examines the effects of an expansion in tourism on capital accumulation, sectoral output and resident welfare in an open economy with an externality in the traded good sector. An expansion of tourism increases the relative price of the nontraded good, improves the tertiary terms of trade and hence yields a gain in revenue. However, this increase in the relative price of nontraded goods results in a lowering of the demand for capital used in the traded sector. The subsequent de‐industrialization in the traded good sector may lower resident welfare. This result is supported by numerical simulations.     

收入分配如何影响经济增长——一个基于需求视角的分析框架

在投资和外贸出口都面临发展约束的情况下,提升消费、扩大内需时经济增长的拉升作用成为新形势和新格局下实现经济可持续发展的重点所在.扩大内需的关键在于调整收入分配格局和缩小居民收入差距,前提则在于理清收入分配对经济增长的传导关系.本文尝试选择一个新颖的视角,即基于需求的研究框架,综合分析收入分配对经济增长的传导机制.主要思想综合为:收入分配在给社会总需求带来"激励效应"的同时.也同样带来了"抑制效应",其经济影响取决于两者的净效应.     

Calibration of incomplete demand systems in quantitative analysis

An easily implemented and flexible calibration technique for partial demand systems is introduced, combining recent developments in incomplete demand systems and a set of restrictions conditioned on the available elasticity estimates. The technique accommodates various degrees of knowledge on cross-price elasticities, satisfies curvature restrictions, and allows the recovery of an exact welfare measure for policy analysis. The technique is illustrated with a partial demand system for food consumption in Korea for different states of knowledge on cross-price effects. The consumer welfare impact of food and agricultural trade liberalization is measured.     

Inequality and Trade Policy: The Pro‐Poor Bias of Contemporary Trade Restrictions

This paper studies the pro‐poor bias of trade policy in India by estimating the household welfare effects of removing the current protection structure. The elimination of a pro‐poor trade policy is expected to have a negative differential welfare effect at the low end of the distribution. The paper first constructs trade restrictiveness indexes for household consumption items and industries using both tariffs and non‐tariff barriers. The results indicate that Indian trade policy is regressive through the expenditure channel as it disproportionately raises the cost of consumption for poorer households, while it is progressive through the earnings channel. Based on the net welfare effects, the elimination of the current trade protection structure is estimated to reduce inequality. These results indicate that a trade policy that is progressive through the earnings channel may induce a price effect that is regressive through the expenditure channel.     

MEASURING CONSUMER WELFARE WITH MEAN DEMANDS*

The welfare change from a price increase–for example, the compensating variation (cv)—is often calculated using the expenditure function from an estimated demand. If there is unobserved preference heterogeneity, then the estimated demand is an average over households with different preferences. And the cv from the mean demand does not generally equal the mean cv. We give conditions ensuring that the cv from the mean demand equals the mean cv, is less than the mean cv, and approximates the mean cv better than the change in consumers' surplus. A necessary condition is that demands become more dispersed as income rises.     

The demand for imports: Estimates of bilateral trade flows

This paper provides estimates, using a traditional import demand model, of the demand for imports on a bilateral basis among nine industrialized nations. These estimates provide greater detail about price and income elasticities, but in general are consistent with earlier, aggregate import demand studies with respect to conclusions about the effects of secular and cyclical income changes on trade balances and whether sufficiently high price elasticities are present to insure that the Marshall-Lerner stability condition is met.     

Neoclassical Growth, Manufacturing Agglomeration, and Terms of Trade

This study reverses the prediction of geography and growth models that trade integration may cause income divergence. Moreover, a new dynamic welfare gain of trade openness is identified. These results are obtained from embedding a new economic geography model into a neoclassical growth model. Starting from symmetric countries, a country that accumulates more capital than the other increases its home market size, improves its terms of trade, and lowers its relative consumption price index, because trade costs drive a wedge in between relative producer and consumption price indices. Both effects in turn tend to increase its marginal revenue product of capital relative to the other country (divergence forces), while factor substitution diminishes its marginal revenue product of capital (convergence force). Reducing trade costs decreases the wedge and weakens the divergence forces, while the convergence force is unaffected. Hence, divergence is more likely with higher rather than lower trade costs.     

Social welfare and the unrepresentative representative consumer

If, for all prices, income distribution is optimal for a planner with a social welfare function, then aggregate demand is the same as that of a single “representative consumer” whose preferences over aggregate consumption are the same as the planner's. This paper shows that the converse is false. Aggregate demand may be the demand function of a representative consumer although the income distribution is not optimal for any social welfare function. The representative consumer may be Pareto inconsistent, preferring situation A to B when all the actual consumers prefer B to A. We give conditions under which existence of a representative consumer implies that the income distribution satisfies first order conditions for optimality. Satisfying the first order optimality conditions for an additively separable social welfare function is essentially equivalent to aggregate demand for every pair of consumers having a symmetric Slutsky matrix.     

Equity, Efficiency and Financial Viability: Public-Utility Pricing with Special Reference to Water Supply

The pricing and investment policies of a public enterprise should be designed to achieve efficiency since equity is better pursued by general policy regarding income distribution. Short-run marginal-cost pricing does not generally lead to long-term deficit, but may involve price and surplus/deficit cycles for the case with lumpy investments and growing demand, where the price increases with demand but is reduced with capacity expansion. Taking account of the extra costs of government revenue collection and the likely average price/cost ratio in the economy, the third-best pricing policy is likely to result in long-term surplus, making the objectives of equity, efficiency and financial viability much more consistent with each other than is generally believed. This is particularly true for water with historically increasing costs of additional sources of supply.     

Public economics of hitchhiking species and tourism-based risk to ecosystem services

This paper is the first to examine the public economics of export-based externalities arising within the provisioning of ecosystem services, with direct application to policies to prevent the spread of hitchhiking invasive species. We find when risk enters through exports, policy makers face a tradeoff between welfare improvements and reducing risk of invasion. Estimates of visitor demand elasticity for ecotourism are low, so price policies are not likely to reduce risk, though they can raise tax revenue. If demand is elastic enough to reduce risk, trade effects can cause loss of income greater than the risk of the invasion. The paper is motivated by the expansion of invasive species’ within the United States. We apply our model to the specific example of quagga and zebra mussels invasion into the U.S. Pacific Northwest.     

Recycling and International Trade Theory

Recently recycling and the production of secondary materials have increased in many countries. However, there is little analysis examining the effects of recycling on comparative advantage, trade, and welfare. In a model with recycling sectors, the author examines whether the Rybczynski theorem is valid, how the price effects are modified, how a recycling subsidy changes the production structure and comparative advantage. It is found that demand has an effect on final goods production and comparative advantage since consumption goods are transformed into recycling inputs.