To Ban or Not to Ban: Foreign Lobbying and Cross‐National Externalities

This paper studies the costs and benefits of foreign lobbying. We show how and when foreign lobbying can help internalize cross‐national externalities. We argue that this is an often overlooked benefit of foreign lobbying. We also study under what conditions a constitutional rule banning foreign lobbying is in the national interest of a country. A key factor in this calculus is whether the interests of foreign lobby groups and domestic unorganized groups coincide or not. We illustrate the logic with examples from trade policy and environmental regulation.     

Welfare effects of competitive lobbying efforts in international oligopoly markets

Conventionally, rent-seeking activities have been considered to deteriorate social welfare and to distort resource allocation. This paper examines whether rent-seeking behavior can improve social welfare by focusing on the welfare effects of firms’ competitive lobbying efforts when governments can impose market entry regulation against foreign firms. We demonstrate that competitive lobbying efforts can improve social welfare when such lobbying efforts are directed to reduce market entry barriers. In addition, social welfare can be maximized when the government shows the maximum sensitivity to the foreign firm's political contributions while maintaining competitive market structure. Moreover, it is shown that the dominant strategy for a domestic firm is to allocate more resources to R&D sectors while it is optimal for foreign firms is to exert more efforts in lobbying to reduce the market entry barriers when a government makes political economic approach in market entry regulations.     

THE NUMBER OF FIRMS AND THE POLITICS OF STRATEGIC TRADE POLICY

Incorporating home firms' lobbying in a country into a third market model of oligopoly, this paper studies how such lobbying affects the government's strategic export policy scheme. We pay special attention to the home firms' lobby formation and its effect on domestic welfare. The home firms can organize a lobby more easily when the number of their rival foreign firms is larger than that of them, and/or when the government is overly concerned with political contribution relative to domestic welfare. The strategic export policy under lobbying cannot improve the domestic welfare, which depends on the number of firms, the government's concern about political donation and the level of socially wasted lobbying costs.     

Cross‐border Lobbying in Preferential Trading Agreements: Implications for External Tariffs and Welfare

This paper examines the effect of cross‐border lobbying on domestic lobbying and on external tariffs in both Customs Union (CU) and Free Trade Area (FTA). We do so by developing a two‐stage game which endogenizes the tariff formation function in a political economic model of the directly unproductive rent‐seeking activities type. We find that cross‐border lobbying un‐ambiguously increases both domestic lobbying and the equilibrium common external tariffs in a CU. The same result also holds for FTA provided tariffs for the member governments are strategic complements. We also develop a specific oligopolistic model of FTA and show that tariffs are indeed strategic complements in such a model.     

Tariff Rate as a Public Good

If domestic firms lobby for protection, the tariff rate is a public good to all domestic firms, whether they engage in lobbying or not. This paper analyzes how the endogenous tariff rate as a public good depends on the group size in two‐stage lobbying models. The result depends not only on whether domestic firms lobby cooperatively or not, but also on whether domestic firms incur indirect lobbying costs or not. This paper shows that if free riding is not very serious and if the number of domestic firms is small compared to the number of foreign firms, entry of a domestic firm is likely to increase the equilibrium tariff rate.     

Market collusion and the politics of protection

This paper investigates the relationship between trade and competition policy within a model where market collusion and protectionist lobbying are themselves related. Collusion and lobbying are modeled as joint products of the same collective effort of firms. In equilibrium, firms cannot achieve greater cooperation in one dimension without reducing it in the other. A trade agreement that limits the effectiveness of lobbying may cause firms to increase market collusion, thereby increasing the domestic price. Thus, international trade agreements may run counter to the goals of competition policy. On the other side, a more restrictive competition policy is shown to either reduce the domestic price or reduce import protection. Thus, competition policy tends to promote trade policy goals. The reason is that restrictive competition policy undermines collusion at the source—it decreases the per-firm benefit to collusion relative to the gains from deviating—reducing firm cooperation in both dimensions.     

THE COMPLEMENTARITY BETWEEN ENDOGENOUS PROTECTION AND DIRECT FOREIGN INVESTMENT

This paper studies the endogenous relationship between direct foreign investgment (DFI) and trade restriction. A domestic labor union interested in both employment and wages bargains with a foreign firm and lobbies against foreign imports. By endogeneizing the wage rate and incorporating resource-using lobbying, we show that more DFI results in higher lobbying efforts and lower imports under fairly general conditions, i.e. a reversal of quid pro quo DFI. We also conduct comparative statics analysis on wages and lobbying efforts.     

Price versus quantity in a mixed duopoly with foreign penetration

We characterize the endogenous competition structure (in prices or quantities) in a differentiated duopoly between a public firm that maximizes domestic welfare and a private firm that can be owned by domestic or foreign investors. The market for which they compete can be domestic or integrated: in the first case Bertrand competition emerges endogenously and in the second case Cournot competition can emerge if the fraction of domestic consumers in the integrated market is low enough. We also determine the optimal degree of foreign penetration showing the optimality of a partial foreign ownership. Finally, we extend the model to increasing marginal cost confirming the robustness of the results.     

National champions and globalization

Abstract .  In this paper, we offer an explanation why globalization (falling trade costs) may increase the government incentive to block foreign takeover of domestic firms and increase its incentive to allow mergers among national firms. This creation of 'national champions' occurs not only because the government may have a bias against foreign takeover, but also because consumer welfare gains associated with foreign acquisitions decrease with globalization. Endogenizing the government bias through lobbying efforts of the domestic firms, the paper shows that the bias does not need to be very strong before the government promotes domestic champions provided that barriers to trade are low.     

Interest Groups, Trade Liberalization, and Environmental Standards

In considering a country that imposes a minimum standard on an imported polluting good, which generates negative consumption externalities, we construct a common-agency model, in which a domestic environmental group and a foreign industrial lobby can influence the formation of the minimum standard by providing political contributions to the government. This paper investigates the effects of trade liberalization on the political equilibrium environmental standard, the pattern of trade, environmental disutility, and social welfare. We find that trade liberalization tightens the minimum standard, decreases imports of the polluting good, and reduces environmental disutilities. The importing country’s social welfare, however, does not necessarily increase with trade liberalization. The weaker the environmental group’s lobbying efficiency, or the stronger the foreign firm’s lobbying efficiency, the more likely it is that trade liberalization will enhance the importing country’s welfare.     

Imported inputs and privatization in downstream mixed oligopoly with foreign ownership

This paper examines welfare implications of privatization in a mixed oligopoly with vertically related markets, where an upstream foreign monopolist sells an essential input to public and private firms located downstream in the domestic country. The impact on domestic welfare of privatizing the downstream public firm is shown to contain three effects. The first is an output distortion effect, which negatively affects welfare since privatization decreases the production of final good for consumption. The second is an input price lowering effect resulting from a decrease in derived demand for the input. When the level of privatization increases, a decrease in final good production lowers input demand, causing input price to decline and domestic welfare to increase. The third is a rent‐leaking effect associated with foreign ownership in the downstream private firm. The rival domestic firm strategically increases its final good production, causing profits accrued to foreign investors to increase and domestic welfare to decline. Without foreign ownership in the downstream private firm, the optimal policy toward the public firm is complete privatization as the output distortion effect is dominated by the input price lowering effect. With foreign ownership, however, complete privatization can never be socially optimal due to the additional negative impact on domestic welfare of the rent‐leaking effect. We further discuss implications for domestic welfare under different privatization schemes (e.g., selling the privatization shares to the upstream foreign monopolist or to the rival domestic firm).     

区域创新效率提升之道:选择性保护还是全面开放

在SNA框架（2008）下科学测算地区R&D资本存量,并利用网络DEA方法测度区域创新效率,以此为基础,利用空间面板模型考察2000—2015年我国各区域对内对外贸易开放对创新效率的影响。结果发现：东部地区创新效率明显高于中西部地区;对外贸易开放度、对内贸易开放度提高均能显著提升区域创新综合效率。不同的是,对外贸易开放度能够促进区域知识创新效率提升,而对内贸易开放度主要提高了区域科技成果商业化效率;从地区影响看,对外贸易开放主要对东部地区创新综合效率具有提升作用,对内贸易开放则主要提升了中、西部地区创新综合效率。基于此,为更好地促进区域创新效率提升,提出相应政策建议。     

Trade liberalization, foreign ownership, and the environment in a small open economy

This paper examines the effects of trade liberalization on firm ownership and the environment for a small open economy. It is found that trade liberalization via tariff reductions can result in a dramatic switch in firm ownership from domestic to foreign, coupled with a lower pollution tax.     

Power Structure and Rent Competition

This paper presents a model of rent competition in a mixed economic system in which wealth maximizing interest group coalitions share wealth according to their relative political power. The model solves for optimal lobbying expenditures of a producer group, a consumer group, and individual firms. The existence of monopolistic rent is not presupposed. Instead, the equilibrium market price, output, and market shares of firms are determined endogenously. As a result, the distribution of rent depends upon the relative political power of each interest group coalition and total lobbying expenditure decreases as the asymmetry in marginal political power among interest group coalitions increases.     

Sabotage in rent-seeking contests

This article considers the interaction between two types ofeffort in lobbying contests: effort that improves the contestant'sown performance (standard rent seeking), and effort that reducesparticular rivals' performance (sabotage). Due to a positiveexternality, sabotage is a 'small number' phenomenon. Sabotagemay increase lobbying efforts and the dissipation rate in lobbyingcontests compared to a situation in which sabotage is not feasible.     

Lobbying, corruption and “optimal” tariff

This paper explores how a government officer enacts “optimum” import policy when confronting lobbies on trade policies from both domestic and foreign firms in a transition economy. Two results are found: firstly, if the inducement from the foreign firm on the government officer works, then the optimum tariff is negative, that is, import subsidy. However, this subsidy will turn to a positive tariff rate with the increasing lobbying inducement from domestic firms. Secondly, zero tariff duty is not an optimum choice under most circumstances. Besides, an asymmetric result is that when these two firms’ marginal costs are different, the optimum policy is to levy an import tariff on the one whose marginal cost is relatively small, while the other firm will get an import subsidy.     

The role of importers and exporters in the determination of the U.S. tariff preferences granted to Latin America

This paper investigates the role played by domestic importers and foreign exporters in improving preferential access to the domestic market. To this end, the framework used in this paper extends the protection for sale analysis to explicitly model the role of domestic importers and foreign exporters in the determination of preferential trade treatment. The predictions of the model are tested using data on preferential trade between the United States and Latin American countries. The results suggest that Latin American exporters and US importers' lobbying efforts have a significant and important role in determining the extent of preferential access granted by the United States. More interestingly, these findings also show that U.S. importers capture a very substantial share of the rents generated by tariff preferences. These results therefore shed a pessimistic view on preferential trade schemes as a reliable source of gains for developing countries.     

Corporate Social Responsibility and International Competition: A Welfare Analysis

This paper examines the welfare implications of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in international markets under imperfect competition. Based on a stylized model of an import‐competing duopolistic market, we show the feasibility of moving toward tariff reductions when both domestic and foreign firms launch CSR initiatives in that their payoffs include not only individual profits, but also the benefits of consumers. For the case where the foreign exporter unilaterally adopts the consumer‐oriented CSR as a strategy, there is a rent‐shifting effect because the foreign firm's payoff increases whereas the domestic firm's profit decreases. In response, the importing country's government raises its tariff on the foreign product. If, instead, the domestic firm adopts the CSR strategy unilaterally, the rent‐shifting effect disappears and both the competing firms’ payoffs increase. We further identify the conditions under which the CSR initiatives of the firms constitute the dominant strategy, leading to a Pareto efficient outcome at which the firms’ payoffs, consumer surplus, and social welfare are at their maximum levels.     

On the Equivalence of Tariffs and Quotas under a Revenue Constraint

This paper sets out a duopolistic model to examine the price and welfare equivalence of tariffs and quotas, given the quota rent is equal to the tariff revenue. It shows that the domestic welfare ranking of the two trade policies crucially depends on the relative costs of the domestic and foreign firms; when the domestic firm's relative costs are lower than those of the foreign firm, a quota regime generally leads to a higher welfare level than that of an equivalent tariff regime. This finding contrasts sharply with the conclusions of Dasgupta and Stiglitz (1977 ), where it was found that a tariff regime always generates higher domestic welfare.     

国际农产品价格如何影响了中国农产品价格?

本文使用月度数据考察国际农产品价格是否影响中国农产品价格,以及影响程度和可能的影响机制。在控制了其他影响因素的条件下,本文证实了国际农产品价格对国内价格具有经济意义上的显著影响,各种农产品的国内价格对相同产品国际价格的反应程度存在较大差异,玉米、大米和大豆价格的国际价格弹性介于0.20到0.36之间,小麦的国际价格弹性为0.05左右,国内外农产品市场间高度的整合关系主要是通过国际贸易建立的。中国在未来为保持粮价稳定需要加大对农业的扶持力度,加强国内农产品储备,合理地对农产品贸易进行管制,建立农产品价格预警机制,并通过财政补贴等手段平抑因国际价格波动而带来的国内农产品价格上涨。