Binding Overhang and Tariff-Cutting Formulas

Trade negotiations deal with cuts in bound duties, which differ substantially from applied preferential duties, and from MFN applied duties. Based on WTO’s Consolidated Tariff Schedules (CTS) database and on national sources, this paper proposes a systematic assessment of ad valorem-equivalent bound duties at the detailed product level, for almost all WTO members. Fully consistent with the assessment of applied protection provided in the MAcMap-HS6 database, this work allows the full structure of protection—bound, MFN applied, preferential applied duties—to be accurately assessed. We thus provide the first worldwide assessment of the binding overhang, i.e. the gap between bound and applied MFN tariffs. We also assess the likely applied-protection impact of an agreement in the Doha Round. JEL no. F13     

全球国际收支失衡的可持续性、调整时机与对策建议

全球国际收支失衡是我们讨论的一个出发点,对此我们有着明显不同的观点.总的来说,我们没有考虑到美国国际收支失衡的可持续性.我们提到了有关解决全球国际收支失衡的一些问题和概念,比如美国的资产回报率可能比较高等问题;前面的讨论主要是考虑到亚洲的顺差,特别是中国的顺差;有时候政策制订者会对危机做出过度反应;余永定也提到中国实际上并不想拥有太多的外汇储备.     

Research report: Energy requirements of mechanized aquaculture

The authors present the results of a comparative study on the energy inputs required for traditional fishing and various techniques of aquaculture in the USA. The importance of suitable environmental conditions for reducing energy costs is stressed.     

Case studies of computer integrated manufacturing systems: A view of uncertainty and innovation processes

The adoption and implementation of new manufacturing processes are conceptualized in terms of coping with uncertainty. Manufacturing management opts for new equipment in order to reduce certain long run, nagging uncertainties, but at the expense of introducing considerable short run uncertainty associated with the innovation. Various coping strategies must be employed to deal with the situation. Our ideas are explored and developed by comparing how four firms in different countries adopted and implemented computer integrated manufacturing systems (CIM). Qualitative interviews with managers at different hierarchical levels and in different functions brought answers to the following questions: 1) What were the reasons for adopting a CIM? 2) What strategies were employed in order to facilitate the introduction of CIM's into the Firm? 3) What were the significant implementation problems that were encountered? In spite of cultural and other differences among the firms, coping with uncertainty explains significant aspects of their innovation processes.     

The Leontief Pollution Model: A Systematic Formulation

In a recent article in this journal, Qayum offered a reformulation of the Leontief pollution model. Here, a systematic formulation of this model is offered which integrates the numerical examples of both Leontief and Qayum.     

The Asymmetric Commodity Inventory Effect on the Optimal Hedge Ratio

Hedging strategies for commodity prices largely rely on dynamic models to compute optimal hedge ratios. This study illustrates the importance of considering the commodity inventory effect (effect by which the commodity price volatility increases more after a positive shock than after a negative shock of the same magnitude) in modeling the variance–covariance dynamics. We show by in‐sample and out‐of‐sample forecasts that a commodity price index portfolio optimized by an asymmetric BEKK–GARCH model outperforms the symmetric BEKK, static (OLS), or naïve models. Robustness checks on a set of commodities and by an alternative mean‐variance optimization framework confirm the relevance of taking into account the inventory effect in commodity hedging strategies.     

The market efficiency hypothesis: the case of coffee and cocoa futures

This study tests the market efficiency hypothesis for coffee and cocoa futures using daily data for contracts with a maturity of 2 and 6 months. The hypothesis is tested sequentially. The first condition is that future spot and futures prices be cointegraled. If this condition is maintained, market efficiency requires the cointegrating vector to support a (0, 1) restriction that can be likened to an unbiasedness condition. Finally, market efficiency imposes zero restrictions on the parameters of the variables expressed in first differences in the specification of the error-correction representation of the relationship between future spot and futures prices. Brenner and Kroner [Brenner, R., Kroner, K., 1995. Arbitrage, cointegration, and testing the unbiasedness hypothesis in financial markets. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 30, pp. 23–42] argue that the cointegration condition is rarely met in practice. They attribute this outcome to potentially non-stationary net cost-of-carry which would make the parameters of the cointegration relation unstable. It is for this reason that Hansen's tests [Hansen, B.E., 1992. Tests of parameter instability in regressions with I(1) processes. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics 10] about the stability of the parameters in cointegration regressions were used to supplement more traditional cointegration tests, Johansen and Juselius' cointegration tests [Johansen, S., Juselius, K., 1992. Testing structural hypotheses in a multivariate cointegration analysis of the PPP and the UIP for UK, Journal of Econometrics 53] could not reject cointegration for all four contracts while Hansen's L_C test favored cointegration only for the cocoa contracts. Nested and non-nested testing procedures were used to test the (0, 1) restriction on the cointegration vector. Unbiasedness was found to be robust across testing procedures. However, further testing about the specification of the error-correction representation revealed the existence of important short run deviations from unbiasedness, Even though these results hold strictly for a rather limited number of contracts and commodities, they are encouraging for futures markets advocates in developing countries.