Strategic Environmental Policy under Free Entry of Firms

With direct trade barriers banned, governments may be tempted to use indirect policy tools to interfere with trade, such as environmental taxes. The author uses a model of an endogenous market structure, where the number of firms is determined by a zero-profit condition in one country but is exogenously given in the other country, to show that a government harboring a fixed number of firms fails to affect aggregate supply, and therefore has little scope for improving domestic environmental quality (if pollution is transboundary). Moreover, owing to the absence of a terms-of-trade effect, it diverts from the classical strategic tax rule. The author argues that both governments arguably fix their equilibrium emission taxes "too low," meaning that tax competition plausibly leads to "ecological dumping."     

Strategic Environmental Policy under Free Trade with Transboundary Pollution

We analyze the effects of trade liberalization on environmental policies in a strategic setting when there is transboundary pollution. Trade liberalization can result in a race to the bottom in environmental taxes, which makes both countries worse off. This is not due to the terms of trade motive, but rather the incentive, in a strategic setting, to reduce the incidence of transboundary pollution. With command and control policies (emission quotas), countries are unable to influence foreign emissions by strategic choice of domestic policy; hence, there is no race to the bottom. However, with internationally tradable quotas, unless pollution is a pure global public bad, there is a race to the bottom in environmental policy. Under free trade, internationally nontradable quotas result in the lowest pollution level and strictly welfare‐dominate taxes. The ordering of internationally tradable quotas and pollution taxes depends, among other things, on the degree of international pollution spillovers.     

International Shareholdings and Strategic Export Policy

If either (i) domestic residents hold shares of the foreign firm or (ii) foreigners hold shares of the domestic firm, an export subsidy can reduce rather than increase national welfare within the Brander-Spencer model. Two sufficient conditions for such a case are presented. Also discussed are the optimal export policies in the presence of international cross shareholdings. [F 12]     

Learning-by-Doing and Strategic Trade Policy

The paper models international rivalry between a domestic firm that is going through a learning-by-doing phase, and a mature foreign rival. It is shown that the optimal production subsidy for the domestic firm depends on the degree of strategic sophistication of the foreign firm. Optimal production subsidy rules are derived under various scenarios. They are shown to be very sensitive to the specification of the game between the domestic and the foreign firms. Whether the optimal subsidy should decrease over time depends on the strategic sophistication of the foreign firm.     

Trade,Strategic Environmental Policy,and Global Pollution

This paper examines the effects of international trade in a model with global pollution that accumulates over time because of production emissions in each country. If countries cooperatively determine their environmental policies, autarky and free trade in the absence of trade costs generate the same optimal solution. By contrast, if environmental policies are determined noncooperatively, the effects of trade on global pollution and welfare are ambiguous because policy games can result in multiple equilibria. Although trade increases both the lower and upper bounds of the pollution stock, whether trade expands the range of possible steady‐state pollution levels is ambiguous. The analysis then extends to consider trade costs.     

Unionized Bertrand Duopoly and Strategic Export Policy

The paper reports that an export subsidy is optimal for a unionized Bertrand duopoly. Following results published by Brander and Spencer ( Journal of International Economics , 1988, pp. 217–34), this establishes the robustness of export subsidization to the mode of competition (Cournot or Bertrand), and contrasts with nonunion results in the literature. If both firms are unionized and both governments pursue active trade policies, a subsidy remains optimal except for a narrow range of extreme substitutability between products. Nations with a lower opportunity cost of labor employ more aggressive policies in equilibrium.     

Strategic Trade Policy and Vertical Structure

We introduce intermediaries into the Brander-Spencer model of strategic trade policy. A key finding is that in regimes involving independent retailers, output competition and linear pricing (and two-part tariffs under certain restrictions), the optimal policy involves an export tax instead of a subsidy. If firms commit to vertical structure before governments commit to policy then under output competition firms choose integration, whereas if policy precedes structure then at least one firm chooses separation. Under price competition separation is a dominant strategy regardless of whether the structure decision is made before or after the policy decision.     

Foreign Ownership,Equity Arbitrage and Strategic Trade Policy *

This paper investigates whether the cost of environmental regulation influences the international location of polluting industries. Industries that operate production facilities in developing countries are identified through their use of the offshore assembly provisions in the U.S. tariff Code. Pollutions Intensity of industry output is found to significantly reduce the probability of conducting offshore assembly in developing countries. This finding contradicts the arguments that developing countries are becoming pollution havens as a result of offshore assembly independent of their general disregard for the environment. Integrating production across national boundaries might actually enhance worldwide environmental quality. Relatively clean stages of the production process are being transferred to developing countries with lax environmental regulations, while polluting segments remain in the U.S. where strict environmental controls are enforced. [F1, Q2]     

International R&D Collaboration and Strategic Trade Policy

We study an international trade model with symmetric countries and symmetric firms, with countries making strategic trade policies, anticipating the decisions of firms on R&D collaboration at the subsequent stage. In general we should observe a conflict between the equilibrium outcome and the efficient one. We find that an asymmetric outcome where one country unilaterally liberalizes trade while the other does not is likely to occur. We also find that while banning international R&D collaboration may help to reach free trade equilibrium in certain situations, it provides little assistance in reaching the outcome that maximizes global welfare.     

贸易自由化、纵向关联市场与战略性环境政策——环境税对发展绿色贸易的意义

本文在一个两国出口至第三国的连续双寡模型中,研究贸易自由化对均衡环境政策及社会福利的影响。分析发现:(1)战略性环境政策的租金攫取效应可通过中间产品出口实现,但不一定会通过最终产品出口实现。(2)当污染的环境损害程度不大时,贸易自由化将降低各国环境税,从而使各国的环境保护出现"向底线赛跑";当环境损害系数较大时,贸易自由化将提高各国环境税。(3)社会福利水平为双边关税壁垒的凹函数(呈"倒U型"),贸易自由化对社会福利的影响不确定。此外,本文还分析了合理征收环境税对发展我国绿色贸易的意义。     

Trade Policies for Exporting Industries under Free Entry

This paper computes optimal export taxes and domestic production subsidies for exporting industries under free entry. We show that domestic welfare is not at maximum, as is typically believed, when the export price is a monopoly price, and the domestic price is a competitive price, because a market structure effect has to be taken into account. Furthermore, we show that the optimal tax/subsidy formulas for an oligopoly coincide with those under perfect competition, if foreign and domestic demand functions are both linear. We also discuss optimal trade policies when only one instrument is available, and we run numerical simulations to determine and compare optimal trade taxes under endogenous and exogenous market structures.     

Strategic Trade Policy with Heterogeneous Costs

The paper examines optimal strategic trade policy under a heterogeneous cost oligopoly. The first‐best policy involves a structure of firm‐specific export subsidies/taxes in which the government favours the most efficient firms only with a sufficiently low social cost of public funds.     

Strategic Trade Policy Under Incomplete Information

This paper examines equilibrium trade policies when firms have better information than governments about the profitability of the industry. Contrary to the intuition that the policymakers' lack of information should reduce their incentives to engage in strategic trade intervention, the analysis suggests that information asymmetries may increase trade policy distortions in equilibrium and ultimately worsen the "prisoner's dilemma" between governments.     

Strategic Trade Policy Under Uncertainty*

This paper extends the Brander-Spencer (1985) model by considering market uncertainty, exploring nonlinear policy, and examining firms' choices of strategic variables. By investigating the interrelationship between trade policy and market conduct, we find that unlike the often-studied linear policy, a nonlinear policy can influence the domestic firm's choice of strategic variables and hence alter the market conduct in favor of the domestic country. Therefore, a nonlinear policy proves strictly superior to a linear one.     

World Bank Trade Adjustment Loans and Export Policy Distortions

Abstract

This work investigates whether World Bank loans fostering trade liberalization are associated with less distorted export policies, by employing some gravity model‐based measures of anti‐export bias, and a Herfindhal index of export revenues concentration. When accounting for non‐random selection in a sample of 88 developing countries over the period 1980‐2000, the receipt of trade adjustment loans seems to have reduced the policy distortion under scrutiny. Such a beneficial influence, however, vanishes when a longer time horizon is considered, casting doubts on the country ownership of waves of liberalizations supported by the Bank.     

论绿色贸易壁垒及发展我国出口贸易的对策

本文分析了绿色贸易壁垒的本质、绿色贸易壁垒对我国出口贸易的影响并提出了相应的对策。     

Strategic Trade Policy and Signalling with Unobservable Costs

In an environment in which home firm costs are private information, home firm output can signal these costs to a foreign competitor and a home policymaker. High-cost home firms have an incentive to misrepresent themselves as low-cost. This is understood by the foreign firm and the home policymaker and results in the first-period optimal per-unit output subsidy to the home firm being less than it would be if home firm output was not a signal of home firm costs. These results are extended to the case of simultaneous signalling and signalling through price.     

Strategic Trade and Industrial Policy Towards Dynamic Oligopolies

We characterise optimal trade and industrial policy in dynamic oligopolistic markets. If governments can commit to future policies, optimal first-period intervention should diverge from the profit-shifting benchmark to an extent which exactly offsets the strategic behaviour implied by Fudenberg and Tirole's 'animal spirits' taxonomy of business strategies. Without government commitment, there is an additional basis for intervention, whose sign depends on the strategic substitutability between future policy and current actions. We consider a variety of applications (to R&D spillovers, consumer switching costs, etc.) and also extensions to constrained second-best policies.     

International Duopoly, Tariff Policy and the Superiority of Free Trade

This paper addresses the effectiveness of tariff policy in the long-run production framework in which decisions must be made about plant size and the level of output to be produced by foreign duopolists competing with each other in the importing country's market. We consider two types of tariff regime, discriminatory and uniform, and show that the importing country's welfare is unambiguously higher in the uniform tariff case. We consider free trade in the same production framework and show that, as the long-run capacity decision becomes increasingly relevant relative to the short-run quantity decision, free trade dominates tariffs in welfare rankings.
JEL Classification Number: F1.     

Domestic Unionization and the Political Economy of Strategic Export Policy

This paper examines the effect of lobbying by a labor union and its parent firm on the argument for strategic export policy in a third market-unionized duopoly. The lobbying-induced export policy frequently deteriorates domestic welfare as compared with free trade. It is true that the politically-determined export policy can improve domestic welfare if the union's bargaining power is strong and the domestic government's responsiveness to political contributions is weak. However, even if the conditions are met, implementing the lobbying-induced export policy will not enhance domestic welfare more than improving labor–management relations. Moreover, the improvement of their relations will be hampered by the opportunity of their lobbying. These results indicate that strategic export policy toward a unionized duopoly should be restrained in light of political economy.