Market Integration and Competition in Environmental and Trade Policies

Recent empirics suggest the relevance of transport cost reductions for world trade growth along with eliminations in protectionist trade barriers. To address the welfare effects of trade cost reductions in a context of ??trade and the environment,?? we develop a two-stage game model where governments choose environmental and trade policies and firms play a Cournot-Nash game. We show that reductions in transport costs lead to lower emission taxes and higher tariffs. And, we find that the degree of pollution damage plays a central role in whether market integration is welfare-improving relative to autarky.     

Tax Principles and Coordination of Trade and Domestic Policies Under Imperfect Competition

We construct an exporting monopoly model to compare destination‐ and origin‐based commodity taxes in a context of a trade and domestic tax reform. We show that an export tax reduction and a change in destination (resp. origin) tax that fix the world price is strictly Pareto‐improving (resp. deteriorating), which holds whether markets are integrated or segmented. This result may provide a new rationale for preferring the destination‐based consumption tax to the origin‐based production tax that has been discussed in the literature of tax harmonisation and tax competition.     

A trade and domestic tax reform in imperfectly competitive markets

This paper develops a model of an export oligopoly to examine the welfare effects of an export tax reduction and a production tax increase that makes the foreign country no-worse off. Whether or not entry into the oligopolistic industry is free, the proposed policy reform is shown to reduce welfare of the policy-implementing country and the world. Relating this result to the perfectly competitive case, we closely discuss its implications.     

Compulsory child restraint seat law and motor vehicle child occupant deaths and injuries in Japan 1994-2005

The purpose of child restraint seats (CRS) is to reduce the number of individuals killed or injured in motor vehicle (MV) crashes. Japanese Road Traffic Law 17-3-4 (April 2000) specifies a requirement that CRS be used for all children aged 0-5 years. The objective of this evaluation was to determine the legislative impact on fatalities in Japan for the period 1994-2005. Data were obtained from the Institute for Traffic Accident Research and Data Analysis. A time-series Poisson regression model was used to analyse the change (6 years pre/post) in incidence rate ratios of fatality and injury in MV crashes among children ages 0-5 years. Despite increases in CRS use, fatalities failed to decrease significantly after enactment of the law (incidence rate ratio: 0.80; 95% CI: 0.49-1.31). In 2005, 67% of children aged 0-5 years, who were killed as MV occupants were not seated in CRS. Between 2000 and 2005, the lack of CRS led to 43% of front seat passenger deaths, 54% of rear seat deaths, 143 children died in total and 500 + children were seriously injured. It was found that the compulsory CRS law enacted in April 2000 did not result in a statistically significant reduction in child MV occupant fatalities and injuries in Japan.     

The size distribution of ‘cities’ delineated with a network theory‐based method and mobile phone GPS data

We delineate “cities” independent of administrative boundaries in Japan by using a network theory‐based method and GPS‐based human mobility data. We divide the country into approximately 1 × 1 km² cells and detect the partition of cells that is optimal from the perspective of information theory. The resulting groups of cells are specified as cities. We find that the combination of two lognormal distributions better fits the city‐size distribution than a distribution with a Pareto upper tail. Moreover, we show that a jump diffusion process is the stochastic process of the city population underlying such a distribution.     

Why Environmentalists Resist Trade Liberalization

We build a two-country differential game model of polluting oligopoly to consider the effects of trade liberalization. As in static models, the opening of trade promotes competition but expands global pollution. Characterizing open-loop and feedback strategies, we derive a sufficient condition for losses from trade. This losses-from-trade proposition could provide a rationale for persistent resistance to globalization by environmentalists.     

Representing tourists’ heterogeneous choices of destination and travel party with an integrated latent class and nested logit model

Aiming at a better understanding of heterogeneous interdependencies between destination and travel party choices in tourism, this study attempts to simultaneously represent these two choices by integrating the nested logit model with the latent class modeling approach to accommodate both types of nested model structures together. Empirical analysis confirmed the effectiveness of the developed model, using a data collected from more than 2000 tourists in Japan. It was observed that on average the two types of nested model structures are almost equally shared by samples and the model structures could significantly vary with income level and gender. Influential factors related to choices of destination and travel party were also explored. Concretely speaking, travel time, attractiveness of destination and number of tourism spots were found to be important influential factors in destination choice, and gender, age, marital status have important effects on travel party choice.     

A Win–Win–Win Tariff–Tax Reform under Imperfect Competition

Taking into account non‐constant marginal costs, this paper considers the effects of a tariff cut combined with a consumption tax increase on welfare, government revenue, and market access. We show that welfare, government revenue, and market access can all improve with this policy reform under decreasing marginal costs. This result may provide a theoretical rationale for the above policy reform, which is guided by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.