Wars,foodcost and countervailing policies: A panel data approach

Withholding food or providing it during a conflict is vital for peace missions and challenges for building sustainable peace. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new perspective in considering the impact of wars on relative wages in the food sector. We define the foodcost as the share of wages paid to the food sector versus total manufacturing wages. We try to estimate the effect of two types of wars (namely, civil and international wars) on the foodcost and explore the policies that are likely to reduce that cost. We use panel data for 41 countries from 1960 to 1999 to answer these questions.     

Competitive General Equilibrium with Finite Change and Theory of Policy Making

We visit the non‐equivalence of tariff and quota in higher dimensional finite change trade models when goods outnumber factors of production. Under competitive conditions, exogenous shocks (e.g., exposure to international trade) support the production of only a subset of commodities. If we try to protect some of the vanishing goods, tariff and quota will have different results when a tariff turns out to be a more restrictive policy than a quota, contrary to the conventional wisdom.     

A Model of Smuggling and Trafficking of Illegal Immigrants with a Host Country Policy

This paper deals with illegal immigration via two distinct activities—smuggling and trafficking of workers. A destination–source model determines economic pay‐offs and a standard labor market policy works as a deterrent. Tax paid by legal unskilled workers at the destination is determined endogenously and it finances inland monitoring against illegal immigration, holding the border patrol at a given level. The tax also finances unemployment benefit to legal workers at the destination. The number of immigrant smugglers and traffickers is also determined endogenously along with employer penalty and market wage for illegal immigrants. Higher unemployment benefits may reduce illegal wages, raise traffickers’ rent and reduce flow of illegal immigrants from the source countries.     

Environment, trade, and strategic interdependence: A simple model with implications for NAFTA

Trade under oligopolistic industry structure is analyzed when the industries pollute the environment and when tax is used to regulate pollution. When trade occurs among neighboring countries, as is the case with NAFTA, the effectiveness of regulation depends on whether pollutants are global (i.e. cross borders) or are locally confined to each country. Not only do industries act strategically, but so do the regulators in each country act strategically vis-a-vis one another. A number of important and interesting results are derived.     

Foreign capital, unemployment and national welfare

We consider a situation where foreign capital is allowed to flow only into the export-processing zone of an economy characterized by unemployment and pursuing protectionary policy. We derive conditions under which growth induced by an increase in the flow of foreign capital will be immiserizing. The results are derived when foreign capital does not directly flow into the protected sector but alters the composition of outputs in the other traded sectors through inter-sectoral reallocation of other resources.     

The rates of return on investment in education in Michigan

Atlantic Economic Journal -