国际贸易环境下我国对外贸易政策的发展方向

近十几年来,全球贸易量取得了惊人的跨越式增长,而自由贸易与环境的关系问题也日趋尖锐。一方面,许多发达国家利用不对等的贸易和投资手段从发展中国家攫取大量战略性资源,却造成这些国家境内生态环境的严重失调;另一方面,一味地追求贸易扩张、资金积累和工业化又实际加剧了全球环境的恶化。环境效应对贸易的挤压性制约日益上升为国际贸易发展的焦点。在此背景下,引入环境变量,促进贸易策略的可持续性便成为实现我国对外贸易科学发展的必然之路。     

Pareto-superior trade policy

Current literature shows the welfare superiority of ad valorem over specific tariffs or domestic governments facing foreign monopolists. This note establishes the stronger result that, for any given specific tariff imposed on a foreign monopoly, there exists an ad valorem tariff that Pareto dominates it - that produces larger profit for the foreign firm as well as larger tariff revenue and consumer surplus for the domestic economy. This Pareto ranking can be extended to the case of foreign Cournot oligopoly under certain market conditions.     

EC trade policy beyond 1992

The initiative to set up the single European market has aroused fears abroad, and indeed even within Europe itself, that the intention is to turn the Community into a “Fortress Europe”. Attempts to allay these fears by the Council of Ministers, the EC Commission or individuals representing them have achieved little success, and on occasion have actually tended to be counter-productive. Is “Fortress Europe” an illusion or a real danger?     

Lobbying costs and trade policy

We study how endogenous lobbying costs influence trade policies. Although in practice lobbying expenditures far exceed campaign contributions, the literature on the political economy of trade policy has focused on the latter. In this paper we develop a model in which informational lobbying costs play a role in determining the structure of protection. In the model, special interest groups can choose to send a signal to the policymaker regarding some information they possess, and the policymaker observes the signal before setting the trade policies. We find that lobbying expenditures directly affect the equilibrium policies. In order to test the predictions of the model we collected data on lobbying expenditures from the Center for Responsible Politics as well as data on trade and industry characteristic variables for the United States from other sources. We perform a structural estimation of the equilibrium trade policies and find support for our model. The empirical evidence indicates that lobbying expenditures play an important role in explaining the variation of protection across sectors. Moreover, the model leads to considerably lower and more reasonable estimates of the weight that the government places on social welfare relative to political contributions.     

Anti-competitive effects of trade policy

Because GATT rules permit countries to take anti-dumping action, anti-dumping measures have come to be regarded as an integral part of the trade landscape. But is it really necessary to have both a domestic competition policy and an external anti-dumping policy, given that both policies aim to promote competition?     

Reciprocated unilateralism in trade policy

Using the menu-auction approach to endogenous determination of tariffs and allowing additionally for lobby formation itself to be endogenous, this paper analyzes the impact of unilateral trade liberalization by one country on its partner's trade policies. We find that such unilateral liberalization may induce reciprocal tariff reductions by the partner country. Intuitively, unilateral liberalization by one country has the effect of increasing the incentives for the export lobby in the partner country to form and to lobby effectively against the import-competing lobby there for lower protection.     

Strategic trade policy for Eastern Europe

The integration of the former state-trading countries into international free trade may, on the one hand, sensibly complement the reforms now under way towards their becoming market economies; on the other hand, this move harbours the risk of perpetuating and indeed aggravating the economic backwardness of those countries. The detrimental effects can be avoided if a product-cycle-oriented economic policy is pursued which makes a deliberate point of utilizing the relatively rich endowment of human capital available in these countries.     

Inequality and endogenous trade policy outcomes

An enduring puzzle in international economics is why trade interventions are biased in favor of import-competing rather than export sectors and therefore restrict trade. In this paper, we show that if the government's objective reflects a concern for inequality then trade policy generally exhibits an anti-trade bias. Importantly, under neutral assumptions, the mechanism that we analyze generates the anti-trade bias independently of whether factors are specific or mobile across sectors. The mechanism also generates an anti-trade bias between large countries even after they sign reciprocal trade agreements that eliminate any terms-of-trade motivation for the use of trade protection.     

EC agricultural policy and international trade

The world markets for agricultural products are in a state of crisis. This is manifested in phenomena such as record surpluses, falling incomes for farmers and constantly increasing agricultural expenditure in a number of industrial countries while, at the same time, people go hungry in many developing regions. What are the factors which have brought this situation about? What can be done to solve these problems?     

Western aid and trade policy trends

The Third Development Decade of the United Nations opened with a promising outlook for the developing countries. The economic situation of the OECD countries had improved during 1979 and the “North-South dialogue” seemed to be making progress. But the further course of 1980 and the subsequent years revealed that the extent and long-term effects of the slump in world economic activity had been seriously underestimated. A large number of developing countries continue to be heavily dependent on development aid. The following article outlines current trends in aid and the likely prospects for the future.     

Pro-poor trade policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines the presence of a pro-poor bias in the existing structure of protection of six Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gambia, and Madagascar. We build on a simple agricultural household production model and we propose an extension to include adjustments in labor income. Our approach, which can be implemented without repeated cross-sections of household level data, suits well the data constraints in SSA. It also allows us to capture the heterogeneity in trade protection at the tariff line level. The pro-poor bias indicators suggest that SSA's trade policies tend to be biased in favor of poor households, as these policies redistribute income from rich to poor households. This is because protection increases the agricultural prices of goods that are sold by African households and this effect dominates both the impacts of higher consumption prices and the strong Stolper–Samuelson effects that benefit skilled over unskilled workers.     

Optimal trade policy with quality-differentiated goods

In this article we apply the model of vertically differentiated products to international trade. A foreign firm competes with a domestic firm in the latter's market, producing products of varying quality. We examine the nature of the equilibrium in this case, assuming the firms compete in prices. Contrary to the popular belief, we show that a protectionist policy of imposing a tariff on the foreign firm raises overall welfare in the domestic economy, as well as induces the domestic firm to upgrade the quality of its product, if it produces the lower quality product. Furthermore, if minimum quality standards are imposed on the foreign firm, the domestic firm upgrades quality, and overall welfare in the domestic economy is higher.     

National protectionism and common trade policy

The EC recently created a new instrument of trade policy to deter illicit trade practices. A major part of its purpose is to strengthen the Community’s authority in the area of trade policy and counter the spread of international protectionism within the Community. The following article demonstrates, among other things, that protectionism in the Community cannot offer a workable alternative to this course.     

Unsolved problems of world trade policy

Talks began early in March in Geneva between the members of the extended EEC and their trading partners. These negotiations are being held in accordance with GATT Statute which insists that third countries must be compensated for any disadvantages they may suffer as a consequence of Great Britain, Denmark and Ireland joining the EEC.     

Autocracy,democracy and trade policy

This paper develops a politico-economic model for use in studying the role of intra-elite conflict in the simultaneous determination of a country's political regime, trade policy and income-tax-based redistribution scheme. Three socioeconomic groups are involved: two elite groups and workers, whose preferences regarding trade policy and income taxation are derived from a simple open-economy model. The critical point is that income taxation induces a rich–poor/elite–workers political cleavage, while trade policy opens the door to intra-elite conflict. In this model, when there is no intra-elite conflict, changes in trade policy are associated with political transitions. Coups (democratizations) open up the economy if and only if both elite groups are pro-free-trade (protectionist). However, in the presence of intra-elite conflict, autocracies respond to popular revolts by changing trade policy and reallocating political power within the elite (to the elite group with the same trade policy preference as the workers) rather than offering to democratize the country. The change in trade policy is credible because the elite group with the same trade policy preference as the workers controls the autocracy. Moreover, in the presence of intra-elite conflict, coups tend to result in the maintenance of the existing trade policy unless popular demands are extremely radical and/or the elite group with the same trade policy preference as the workers is exceptionally weak.     

China’s foreign trade policy

China’s maxim of trusting in its own strength may well be the vital clue to an understanding of its foreign trade policy. In the fifties two-thirds of the Chinese foreign trade was conducted with Comecon states, above all the Soviet Union. After the break with the Kremlin Peking decided on a widely diversified, multilateral policy for its foreign trade. “To make foreign things serve China” became the motto.     

The foreign trade policy of Japan

The article offers an analysis of the changes, during the past decade, in Japan’s foreign trade pattern. Special regard is given to the effects of the wave of price increases in the world commodity markets which, owing to the large share of raw materials and food in the country’s imports, has hit Japan particularly severely.