The welfare implications of trade liberalization between the Southern Mediterranean and the EU

The impact on the Southern Mediterranean Countries (SMC) of the current process of trade liberalization with the European Union is explored. The methodology is that of computable general equilibrium modelling under imperfect competition and the model includes ten countries and 11 sectors. This allows for both a cross-country and cross-sectoral analysis of the results. The experiments considered are the full liberalization of tariffs, as well as changes in market access and trade-induced changes in productivity. A key feature of the paper is that the phased introduction of tariff reductions is allowed for as explicitly envisaged in the Agreements. The results show that the process of liberalization may have a substantial, though non-monotonic, impact on the SMC economies in terms of both changes in production and through this on welfare. The welfare impact is potentially very high in particular for the high tariff economies. The sources of the welfare gain tend to derive from perfectly competitive explanations of trade for the high tariff economies, and from imperfectly competitive explanations of trade for the low tariff economies.     

Industrial organization in a restructuring socialist economy: Evidence from Bulgaria

Using new data for all state and cooperatively-owned Bulgarian establishments and enterprises in 1988 and 1989 we portray key aspects of Bulgarian industrial organization. During 1988–89: state ownership became less dominant; there was an abrupt reversal in the twenty year trend towards bigger economic units; more than half of the largest firms were concentrated in certain sectors, notably engineering and construction; using official prices, only about 10% of enterprises made losses. These data and other new data for manufacturing products enable calculation of diverse measures of market structure as this may evolve under the policies introduced in 1991. Indices of market concentration typically show substantial concentration; usually about 50% of manufacturing output was produced in potentially competitive environments. While estimates of minimum efficient scale imply that MES does not constitute a significant barrier to entry for new competitors, the underdeveloped nature of the Bulgarian capital market probably greatly restricted entry.     

The welfare costs of corruption

Corruption has been shown to affect a variety of economic indicators, especially GDP per capita. However, as GDP is not a genuine indicator of welfare, it may reflect the welfare costs of corruption only in an incomplete way. This article uses self-rated subjective well-being as an empirical approximation to general welfare and shows that cross-national welfare?–?operationalized in this way?–?is affected by corruption not only indirectly through GDP, but also directly through nonmaterial factors. This article estimates the size of these effects as well as their monetary equivalent. The direct effect?–?not previously investigated in the corruption literature?–?is found to be substantially larger than the indirect effect.     

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     

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.     

Fixed export cost heterogeneity, trade and welfare

Recent literature on the workhorse model of intra-industry trade has explored heterogeneous cost structures at the firm level. These approaches have proven to add realism and predictive power. This paper presents a new and simple heterogeneous-firms specification. We develop a symmetric two-country intra-industry trade model where firms are of two different marginal cost types and where fixed export costs are heterogeneous across firms. This model traces many of the stylized facts of international trade. However, we find that with heterogeneous fixed export costs there exists a positive bilateral tariff that maximizes national and world welfare.     

Asymmetric oligopoly, international trade, and welfare: a synthesis

This paper analyzes the relationship between market shares and welfare under the assumption of Cournot-oligopolistic interdependence in production. The model is general enough to deal with multiple countries, oligopolists with different levels of marginal costs within each country, and any distribution of world demand across countries. It is found that the elimination of a minor firm harms the country if the country's total production is very little. However, such a policy always benefits the country if it exports the commodity. The welfare effect of production subsidies and the case of foreign ownership of firms are also discussed.     

Household inequality, social welfare, and trade

Working with Sen social welfare functions (meaning explicit separability between mean income and income dispersion), we develop a generalized dual approach to tracking household inequality aspects of social welfare in general equilibrium. We highlight how household equity can be examined analytically alongside production efficiency in duality-based models, using our dual framework to explore potential trade-offs between efficiency and equity effects of trade policy. Our results complement the set of standard inequality results in trade theory focused on functional rather than household inequality. We also find that the relative distributional impact of tariffs on welfare is conditional on the initial level of inequality.     

Deconstructing gravity: trade costs and extensive and intensive margins

Abstract This paper uses data on US exports to decompose exports into the number of exporting firms (the extensive margin) and average export sales (the intensive margin). We show how a range of proxies for trade costs has different impacts on the two margins. Distance has a negative effect on both margins, but the magnitude is considerably larger for the extensive margin. Most of the variables capturing language, internal geography, infrastructure and import cost barriers work through the extensive margin. We show that these results are consistent with a Melitz‐style model of trade with heterogeneous firm productivity and fixed costs.     

The welfare costs of union wage compression

This paper calculates the quantitative significance of the welfare costs of union wage compression. This is done in a dynamic general equilibrium model with overlapping generations where agents choose both schooling (human capital) and assets (physical capital). The labor market in this model is characterized as a right-to-manage contract, which allows unions to compress wage differentials between high- and low-skilled workers, by implementing a binding minimum wage. This paper shows that when labor markets are competitive even low levels of wage compression lead to large welfare losses, since wage compression creates costly unemployment among low-skilled workers. The effect of wage compression on the supply of skilled labor, however, is rather small, since the disincentive effect of a lower, high-skilled wage is, to a large extent, offset by a lower opportunity cost of schooling due to higher unemployment.     

Parallel trade,product quality,and welfare

We study the welfare effects of parallel trade (PT) considering investment in quality. We thus revisit the case for PT in research-intensive industries. We find that PT may raise quality, depending on how preferences for quality differ across countries. Conditional on quality, consumer surplus may rise (fall) in the PT-source (PT-recipient) country. While PT reduces ex post welfare, improving quality is a necessary condition for PT to increase welfare ex ante.     

Growth, welfare and optimal trade taxes: a fallacy of composition

Optimal export taxation rules out the possibility of immiserizing growth in a two-country world. Thus, productivity increases in the exporting sector must be welfare improving. This paper shows that in a multicountry world such reasoning commits a fallacy of composition. Simultaneous growth of exporting nations can lead to welfare losses in the presence of unilaterally optimal export taxes. Also, optimal export taxes can decline in response to such growth. This result further strengthens the possibility of perverse welfare movements. Thus, standard policy recommendations of increasing productivity in the exporting sector may lead to unintended and self-defeating outcomes.     

On the welfare effects of trade and investment liberalization

Using a three-factor knowledge- and physical capital model of trade and multinational activity, we consider a set of policy experiments to assess the welfare effects of trade and investment liberalization in general equilibrium. Specifically, we address the question of whether and under which circumstances a single versus a combined trade/investment liberalization strategy or a unilateral versus a bilateral policy change is preferable from a single country's and the world's point of view. The focus of this paper is to look at three relevant questions. First, when is investment liberalization beneficial and when is it harmful for a single economy or the whole world? Second, is pure investment liberalization a welfare maximizing strategy? Third, when is either kind of liberalization (trade, investment, or both) welfare improving and when neither of them?     

The welfare costs of unreliable water service

Throughout the developing world, many water distribution systems are unreliable. As a result, it becomes necessary for each household to store its own water as a hedge against this uncertainty. Since arrivals of water are not synchronized across households, serious distributional inefficiencies arise. We develop a model describing the optimal intertemporal depletion of each household's private water storage if it is uncertain when water will next arrive to replenish supplies. The model is calibrated using survey data from Mexico City, a city where many households store water in sealed rooftop tanks known as tinacos. The calibrated model is used to evaluate the potential welfare gains that would occur if alternative modes of water provision were implemented. We estimate that most of the potential distributional inefficiencies can be eliminated simply by making the frequency of deliveries the same across households which now face haphazard deliveries. This would require neither costly investments in infrastructure nor price increases.     

Market entry and trade weighted import costs

Trade weighting is a common method of aggregating trade frictions. It will understate changes in these costs when there are non‐ad valorem trade costs and quality differences. Newly traded goods enter at higher trade costs than previously traded ones. Lower import costs shift trade to low‐quality goods with higher measured trade costs. These effects are quantitatively important. U.S. import costs fall more than twice as fast as trade weighted measures from 1974 to 2004 after the impact of shifting quality and newly traded goods is accounted for. Empirical estimates that use trade weighting will underestimate the welfare impact of trade costs.     

Preferential trade and mis-invoicing: Some analytical implications

This paper examines how different trade policies affect illegal trade practices, foreign exchange market and the degree of illegal capital outflow. It builds up a three-country preferential–non-preferential trade model where low or zero tariff prevails in the preferential trade channel and higher tariff is exercised in the non-preferential trade channel. We show that initially the preferential trade channel is likely to encourage illegal capital outflow and non-preferential trade channel is conducive for illegal transactions in foreign exchange in the local market. But finally a low tariff regime takes care of both illegal capital outflow and black market for foreign exchange.     

Endogenous property rights regimes, common-pool resources and trade

A model is developed where opening to trade affects a dynamic common-pool resource stock and welfare through a community's voting decision to institute a property rights regime regulating the stock. The model finds that resource stock levels can decline even when a Markov perfect equilibrium path for labor and property rights regimes are chosen to maximize welfare. Thus, opening to trade can be welfare maximizing even when resource stock declines. Experimental results show that under certain conditions, subjects briefly follow a Markov perfect equilibrium path for property rights regime choice but labor allocations are myopically chosen indicating that some resource dynamics may be considered by subjects.     

An analysis of entry-then-privatization model: welfare and policy implications

This study formulates a new model of mixed oligopolies in free entry markets. A state-owned public enterprise is established before the game, private enterprises enter the market, and then the government chooses the degree of privatization of the public enterprise (termed the entry-then-privatization model herein). We find that under general demand and cost functions, the timing of privatization does not affect consumer surplus or the output of each private firm, while it does affect the equilibrium degree of privatization, number of entering firms, and output of the public firm. The equilibrium degree of privatization is too high (low) for both domestic and world welfare if private firms are domestic (foreign).     

Preferential trade areas, multinational enterprises, and welfare

Abstract.  The effects of preferential trade areas (PTAs) on the investments by multinational enterprises and their implications for the welfare of members and non‐members are studied in a model with two types of firms: national firms and multinational firms. In the presence of multinational activity PTAs can create new investment as well as divert investment from non‐members to members. Both affect the welfare of members positively. More interestingly, if the investment creation effect of a PTA is sufficiently strong, then the PTA could be welfare enhancing for non‐members as well. JEL classification: F2, L1     

Countries, regions and trade: On the welfare impacts of economic integration

We study the impact of falling international trade costs and falling national transport costs on the economic geography of countries involved in an integration process. Each country is formed by two regions between which labor is mobile, whereas there is no international mobility. Goods can be traded both nationally and internationally at positive, but different, costs. A decrease in trade costs and/or in transport costs has a direct impact on prices and wages, which allows us to account for the impact of changes in these parameters on the economic geography and welfare of each country. We show that, as trade barriers fall, the benefits of integration come after its costs. We also show that national transport policies are of the beggar-thy-neighbor type. On both counts, policy coordination is required in the process of economic integration.