Maximum-revenue tariffs versus free trade

Welfare with the maximum-revenue tariff is compared to free-trade welfare under Cournot duopoly with differentiated products; under Bertrand duopoly with differentiated products; and under perfect competition in the case of a large country able to affect its terms of trade. Under Cournot duopoly and Bertrand duopoly, assuming linear demands and constant marginal costs, welfare with the maximum-revenue tariff is always higher than free-trade welfare. Under perfect competition, assuming linear demand and supply, welfare with the maximum-revenue tariff will be higher than free-trade welfare if the country has sufficient market power.     

Politically influenced counterterrorism policy and welfare efficiency

The paper examines how two targeted countries strategically deploy their counterterror forces when lobbying defense firms influence counterterror provision. For proactive measures, lobbying activities in a single targeted country lessen underprovision, raise overall counterterrorism, and reduce terrorism. Welfare decreases in the lobbied country but increases in the other targeted country owing to enhanced free riding. Lobbying influence on the targeted countries' welfare is tied to terrorists' targeting preferences and how the lobbied government weighs citizens’ welfare. Lobbying in both targeted countries may result in the first-best equilibrium. International policy coordination may lead to less efficient outcomes than the noncooperative equilibrium.     

South African trade policy mattersTrade performance and trade policy*

South African trade policy has exerted a major influence on the composition and aggregate growth of trade. In the Apartheid period, South Africa developed a comparative advantage in capital‐intensive primary and manufactured commodities partly because of its natural resource endowments, but also because the pattern of protection was particularly detrimental to exports of non‐commodity manufactured goods. By contrast, trade liberalization from 1990 not only increased imports, but by reducing both input costs and the relative profitability of domestic sales also boosted exports. This evidence suggests that additional trade liberalization and policies that afford South African firms access to inputs at world prices could well be part of the strategy to enhance export diversification.     

Computing revealed preferences and limits to the validity of quadratic objective functions for policy optimization

Planning problems with m targets, n instruments and quadratic objective functions have often been used to study the revealed preferences of governments' stabilization policies. Problems with the homogeneity of the objective function and related issues of approximation theory are explored.     

Electoral regime and trade policy

We study how trade protection varies with the electoral rules for legislative representation. In particular, we investigate different hypotheses about why trade policy differs between countries with legislatures elected by a plurality election rule in single member constituencies and legislatures elected by a proportional, or party-list, rule. Our results, which are in line with the existing literature, show that countries with list-PR systems tend to have lower trade barriers than countries with majoritarian systems. We expand on this literature by looking at the mechanisms through which this correlation can be explained. Our findings indicate that, contrary to existing theory, neither constituency size nor party strength are important when explaining this correlation. Country size does matter, but does not explain the whole of the correlation.     

China's foreign trade policy and world trade organization membership

This paper provides an overview of China's major economic reforms and how they impacted certain key domestic economic indicators such as income, production, employment, and prices. More importantly, the paper concentrates on China's foreign trade focusing on such issues as import and export policies, exchange rate controls, foreign investments, balance of payments, traded commodities, and major trading partners. China's chance of becoming a member of the World Trade Organization is also addressed.     

贸易自由化渐进性与中国外贸政策的适应性

经济全球化代表着一种新型的国际经济关系的产生与发展,其最核心的内容包括生产的一体化、贸易的自由化与金融的国际化,而贸易自由化既是经济全球化的先导,又是经济全球化程度加深的主要促动因素。不论是过去,还是现在,乃至可预见的未来,贸易自由化的过程都具有鲜明的渐进性特征。本文拟对贸易自由化的渐进性进行历史考察并作出理论解释,以便为我国”入世“后外贸政策的调整及体系构建提供一种思路。     

Political preference functions,trade wars,and trade negotiations

The integration of elementary political considerations into computable general equilibrium models is considered, and an extended illustration to agricultural trade negotiations provided. The application involves an evaluation of the payoffs of alternative support levels to agricultural and non-agricultural interests in the EC and the US. A government political preference function for each region is calibrated as a CES aggregation of the payoffs to the two interest groups, with weights corresponding to their benchmark political influence. The political preference function is presumed to be employed by each government to determine the level of agricultural support. The analysis illustrates how sensitive such computable general equilibrium models can be to elementary political considerations, mainly due to the flatness of the implied Pareto frontier. It also illustrates how one can modify the traditional political preference function approach to accommodate possible convexities of the Pareto frontier in empirical models.     

中国汽车产业政策与美国贸易政策的摩擦

改革开放以来,我国在许多领域推行了内容广泛的产业政策。然而,在世界经济一体化的今天,各国国内经济政策与其对外经贸的互动作用日益突出,贸易伙伴的反应常常在很大程度上决定着一国国内经济政策的可行性,因此,各国在制定任何一项产业发展政策时,都不能不顾及该政策对其贸易伙伴的影响及其可能作出的反应。显然,要考虑我国产业发展政策的可行性,就应当未雨绸缪,深入研究其与主要贸易伙伴贸易政策的矛盾。     

Export market correlation and strategic trade policy

In the traditional models of strategic trade policy pioneered by Brander and Spencer, exports of the domestic firm, engaged in a Cournot-Nash competition with the foreign firm in a neutral market, must be subsidized to maximize national welfare. We demonstrate that when the firms play the Cournot-Nash game in two stochastic and positively correlated markets, it may be optimal to tax exports to the more volatile market while subsidizing it in the other. The policy combination reduces the amplitude of aggregate profit and raises the utility of the risk-averse firm in a manner similar to the theory of portfolio choice. JEL Classification: F12, D18
Marchés d'exportation co-reliés et politique commerciale stratégique. Dans les modèles traditionnels de politique commerciale stratégique proposés par Brander et Spencer, les exportations de la firme nationale, qui est engagée dans une concurrence à la Cournot-Nash avec une firme étrangère dans un marché neutre, doit être subventionnée si l'on veut maximiser le niveau national de bien-être. On montre que, quand les entreprises jouent un jeu à la Cournot-Nash dans deux marchés d'exportation stochastiques et positivement co-reliés, il peut être optimal de taxer les exportations vers le marché le plus volatile et de subventionner les exportations vers l'autre marché. Cette combinaison de politiques réduit l'amplitude de variation des profits agrégés et augmente l'utilité de l'entreprise qui a une aversion au risque d'une manière qui ressemble à ce qui se passe dans la théorie des choix de portefeuilles.     

Inter-industry wage differentials and strategic trade policy

Recent studies suggest that inter-industry wage differentials exist which are neither caused by different endownments of the workers with human capital, nor by different working conditions, nor by institutional rigidities. Higher employment in high-wage sectors due to exports, therefore, raises welfare. According to empirical evidence presented here more likely than not net exports from sectors paying wage premia lead to some extra gains from trade (that cannot be explained by trade policy promoting primary sectors by high amounts of subsidies per employee) for the German economy. A case is made, however, against strategic trade policy in favour of these sectors pointing to uncertainty about the amount of the differentials, their international (dis)similarity, and their sources.

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Zusammenfassung Empirische Untersuchungen deuten darauf hin, daß auch in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Arbeitskräfte mit gleicher Humankapitalausstattung, die unter gleichen Arbeitsbedingungen in Unternehmen gleicher Größe in einer Region arbeiten, unterschiedlich entlohnt werden, wenn sie in unterschiedlichen Sektoren arbeiten. Bestehen solche Sektorlohndifferentiale, dann hat eine Ausweitung der Beschäftigung in Hochlohnsektoren positive Wohlfahrtseffekte. Es wird daher vielfach gefordert, diese primären Sektoren vor internationaler Konkurrenz zu schützen und sie durch Subventionen zu fördern. Die vorliegende Arbeit präsentiert empirische Evidenz dafür, daß die Bundesrepublik Deutschland Extra-Gewinne aus dem Außenhandel bezieht, weil zwischen der Netto-Exportquote und der Höhe des Sektorlohndifferentials ein positiver Zusammenhang besteht, ohne daß sich die Subventionspolitik an diesen Differentialen orientiert. Gegen eine gezielte Förderung der Hochlohnsektoren im Rahmen einer strategischen Handelspolitik werden dann drei Argumente vorgebracht, die mit Unsicherheiten über Höhe, internationale Ähnlichkeit und Ursachen der Differentiale zusammenhängen.

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Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the international economists' group of the Verein für Socialpolitik at Hohenheim University in May 1991, at the Sixth Annual Congress of the European Economic Association in Cambridge in September 1991, and at the Universities of Hamburg and Bielefeld. I would like to thank participants at the discussions and four anonymous referees for helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Trade policy and distortions in intra-Asian trade

This paper analysis wheather the level of tariffs and non-tariff barriers affect the pattern of inter-industry trade within Asia. The Heckscher–Ohlin theorem is based on the assumption of efficient resource allocation. However, markets in many developing countries protect the domestic production by trade barriers. We would therefore expect the pattern of production and trade not to reflect comparative advantages perfectly. It is found that import charges and non-tariff barriers have a significant positive impact on capital intensities in net export.     

Global trade flows and economic policy uncertainty

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the impacts of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on global trade flows in gauging international trade developments. We employ a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) trade model, augmented with value-added bilateral trade linkages, that allows for quantifying the effects of economy-specific uncertainty shocks on exports and imports of individual economies. We find substantial spatial propagation in the temporal dynamics of international transmission of shocks amidst the manifestations of cross-border global value chains (GVCs) with China’s accession into the WTO. We provide evidence for the significance of EPU of China and the United States, particularly the latter, in influencing global trade flows. Our results show that while the US impacts can largely be attributed to its indirect trade linkages with other economies, the impacts of China can be relegated more to its direct GVC linkages. The findings have implications on trade protectionist inclinations of the current-term US government and the ongoing efforts of China’s policymakers in steering macroeconomic rebalancing for sustainable growth.     

The impact of cultural exceptions: audiovisual services trade and trade policy

Audiovisual services such as music and movies in digital formats have gained substantial importance over the last decade, while remaining one of the sectors with the lowest number of commitments by WTO members. Based on a novel data set, this article analyses the role of trade restrictions on audiovisual services in a gravity model. We find that countries with WTO commitments trade more audiovisual services, while both exports and imports are lower for countries which impose policies to curb inflows of foreign cultural services.     

Growing through trade in intermediate goods: the role of foreign growth and domestic tariffs

We show that pure Ricardian trade can account for the empirical evidence that domestic growth is more affected by foreign growth than by trade openness. To do this, we develop a two‐country model involving a backward economy that exchanges intermediate goods with a faster growing country. We obtain three main results regarding growth and welfare of the backward economy: (i) the growth‐enhancing comparative advantage is facilitated by faster foreign growth; (ii) the growth rate may be negatively affected or unaffected by a domestic tariff, while it is always positively impacted by foreign growth; and (iii) a domestic tariff could be welfare‐improving.     

New trade theory versus old trade policy: a continuing enigma

This paper examines the theoretical and empirical grounds fortrade liberalisation. We note that many of the conventionalarguments relating to the static and dynamic gains from liberalisationare based on fragile theoretical grounds. We also show that,although new trade theory takes account of some of the complexitiesof international trade and although the analytical thrust ofmany models justifies intervention, such policy conclusionsare rejected even by those at the forefront of these theorieson the grounds of political economy arguments which do not standup to careful scrutiny. Finally, we show that arguments favouringtrade liberalisation are not supported by existing empiricalresearch, which generally fails to capture the complex and ambiguouseffects of liberalisation and openness.     

Environmental policy instruments and imperfectly competitive international trade

Policy makers, industrialists and environmentalists express concern that the imposition of tough environmental policies in some countries displaces production, and hence pollution, to countries which impose less tough environmental policies. Yet empirical studies of such impacts suggest they are small. However, these findings are derived from models in which international trade is modelled as being perfectly competitive. In this paper I model trade as imperfectly competitive with scope for strategic behavior by producers, in this case investment in capital. I show that the choice of environmental policy instrument can have a marked impact on the incentives for producers to act strategically, with environmental standards significantly reducing the incentives for strategic overinvestment relative to environmental taxes or no environmental policy at all. Whether welfare is higher using standards or taxes depends on whether producing countries are also significant consumers of the polluting product, and on whether all producing governments act to reduce emissions or only some subset of governments. To assess the quantitative significance of these theoretical results I conduct policy simulations on a calibrated model of the world fertilizer industry. These simulations show that the impact of environmental policy on strategic behaviour can be large.     

Unemployment and the welfare effects of trade policy

Abstract.  In this paper the welfare effects of tariffs and import quotas in the presence of involuntary unemployment are derived and compared. The framework used is the standard model of a competitive small open economy with many goods and factors. Optimum levels of the respective trade policy instruments are derived, as well as welfare increasing reform strategies. In all cases, the labour intensity of the import‐competing sectors turns out to be a crucial variable for deriving the welfare effects. JEL classification: F13, F16