A general equilibrium evaluation of the fiscal costs of trade liberalization in Ukraine

The establishment of an Association Agreement/Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (AA/DCFTA) with the European Union (EU) would be the next significant step towards Ukraine’s deeper integration into the world economy. Despite widely expected additional welfare gains, the signing of the AA/DCFTA at the Third Eastern Partnership summit in November 2013 in Vilnius was suspended by the Ukrainian government due to geopolitical concerns and a severe economic and financial crisis in Ukraine coming along with high external debt and a substantial public budget deficit. This puts the fiscal consequences of Ukraine’s continued liberalization into focus, as transition and developing countries face higher fiscal costs associated with trade integration. Accordingly, this paper contributes to the literature by analyzing the part of the potential EU-Ukraine DCFTA which leads to a loss of tariff revenues, namely the tariff elimination. In particular, we apply a static Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model for the single small open economy of Ukraine and focus on the effects of Ukraine’s unilateral tariff elimination by simulating three scenarios reflecting different means to compensate for the loss of tariff revenues. It turns out to be important to take these costs into consideration while modeling trade liberalization, as the results vary significantly across the scenarios.     

Trade liberalization gains under different trade theories: a case study for Ukraine

We analyze the deep and comprehensive free trade area (DCFTA) between Ukraine and the EU using a multi-regional general-equilibrium simulation model. Three alternative trade structures are implemented: (a) a standard specification of perfect competition based on the Armington assumption of regionally differentiated goods; (b) monopolistic competition among symmetric manufacturing firms; and (c) a competitive selection model of heterogeneous manufacturing firms. Across these structures the DCFTA indicates relatively large gains for Ukraine of more than 3 percent. We show, however, that the gains for Ukraine are lower when we consider monopolistic competition in manufacturing. This is attributed to a movement of resources into Ukraine’s traditional export sectors to the EU, which produce under constant returns. While there is little danger of deindustrialization dominating the overall welfare gains, we do observe substantially lower gains when we consider monopolistic competition. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical confirmation of the theoretic predication that the relative gains from trade in monopolistic competition models might be lower than under perfect competition in the context of a numeric simulation of economic integration. Under the popular heterogeneous-firms monopolistic competition theory we find significant firm selection effects indicating welfare impacts for Ukraine that are less than under the Armington structure but above those found under symmetric firms and monopolistic competition. These results are important considerations for Ukraine’s overall development strategy.     

Foreign multinationals in service sectors: A general equilibrium analysis of Brexit

We examine the role of foreign multinationals in service sectors in the context of Brexit, which is assumed to induce an increase in different types of barriers: (a) FDI barriers to multinationals in services; (b) non-tariff barriers to trade; and (c) import tariffs between the UK and the rest of the EU. We use a state-of-the-art Melitz approach in manufactures with multinationals operating in imperfectly competitive service sectors in a multiregional general equilibrium framework. We find that the increased FDI barriers in services explain about one third of the total welfare loss of Brexit. Furthermore, our decomposition analysis (by introducing each type of barriers separately) shows that the barriers against the EU service multinationals in the UK are harmful to British manufacturing sectors because they face a reduced (and more expensive) supply of intermediate services.     

Ukraine's unconsidered losses from the annexation of Crimea: What should we account for in the DCFTA forecasts?

In March 2014 Crimea unilaterally declared its independence from Ukraine and joined the Russian Federation. The separation of a part of a state's territory and economy is an interesting matter to examine. The economy of Ukraine has not only shrunk, but also changed its structure as Crimea had a quite distinct production pattern compared to the rest of Ukraine. Moreover, policy measures initialized before the separation may have different effects once applied only to a part of the former economy. This paper proposes a strategy to model the separation of part of an economy and its inclusion into another country and applies this strategy to the case of Crimea, Ukraine, and Russia. Having constructed a model for the new geographical and economic situation, we reinvestigate the possible effects of a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement between Ukraine and the EU and compare the results for the situation with Crimea as part of Ukraine. We find that the annexation of Crimea leads to severe economic losses for Ukraine which are partly overproportional compared to Crimea's economic size. These negative effects can be compensated by implementing the DCFTA with the EU as we also show in our model results.     

Trade and foreign direct investment-related impacts of Brexit

We offer a general-equilibrium analysis of Brexit incorporating the state-of-the-art differences in productivity and firms' selection within manufacturing sectors à la Melitz (Econometrica, 2003, 71 , 1695) and multinationals in services. Our results suggest that trade, output and average productivity diminish across most sectors in the UK and the Rest of the European Union (REU), as well as GDP, welfare, wages and capital remuneration. However, the UK loses more due to the missing preferential access to the huge EU market. Significant welfare losses along the extensive margin occur in the UK due to the lost imported varieties produced by highly productive European firms. These cannot be compensated by the new varieties of less productive domestic firms that enter the British market due to increased protectionism and reduced import competition. In addition, the emergence of barriers against multinationals, which is often ignored in previous studies, explains approximately one third of the negative effect in both the UK and REU. Furthermore, we show that the Brexit impact is about only half if we do not include both foreign direct investment barriers and Melitz structure. Thus, previous studies without these important model features would underestimate the Brexit impact significantly.     

Privatisation and the unusual case of Belarusian accession to the WTO

The accession negotiations of Belarus to the WTO are unusual since, due to its obligations in the Eurasian Economic Union, WTO accession is not expected to impact its tariffs or formerly substantial trade‐distorting agricultural subsidies. Nonetheless, we estimate that WTO accession will increase welfare by 9.9% of consumption in Belarus. We show that inclusion of: (i) foreign direct investment; (ii) reduction in non‐discriminatory barriers against services providers; and (iii) our model with imperfect competition and endogenous productivity effects together produce estimated gains eleven times larger than a model of perfect competition with only cross‐border trade in services. Our analysis is enabled by our production of a data set on both discriminatory and non‐discriminatory barriers in services and their ad valorem equivalents. Based on a new data set on labour productivity by sector and type of ownership, in our central model, we estimate that privatisation will increase welfare by 35.8% of consumption. We find substantial variance in the estimated gains from privatisation depending on model assumptions, but all the estimates of the impacts of privatisation indicate substantial welfare gains.     

Modeling of FDI in business services: Additional effects in case of Ukraine's European integration

To analyze Ukraine's deep and comprehensive integration with the EU, we develop a multi-regional general-equilibrium simulation model incorporating heterogeneous firms and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in business services. This allows for consideration of (a) trade growth in new varieties; (b) aggregate productivity changes attributed to reallocation of resources across and within an industry; and (c) productivity growth in manufacturing due to increased access to business services. The results indicate relatively small gains for the EU, whereas Ukraine benefits with a welfare increase of over 8%. The deindustrialization impact, previously found by Olekseyuk and Balistreri (2014 Olekseyuk, Z., and E.J. Balistreri. 2014. “Trade Liberalization Gains under Different Trade Theories: A Case Study for Ukraine.” Working Paper 2014-13. Colorado School of Mines, Division of Economics and Business. Golden. [Google Scholar]) in a comparison of different modeling structures, is supported by our findings. Ukraine's welfare gains are higher under an Armington structure compared to monopolistic competition. This is due to a movement of resources into Ukraine's traditional export sectors producing under constant returns. Implementation of the FDI modeling approach and liberalization of barriers to FDI, however, mitigates the deindustrialization impact as multinational firms enter the Ukrainian market. This increases the number of available varieties and, consequently, induces productivity growth of manufacturing sectors due to improved access to business services as critical inputs.