The Dark Matter of Bilateral Preferential Margins: An Assessment of the Effect of US Tariffs

This article aimed to quantify the impact of United States (US) trade policies and assess how changes in tariff margins will affect imports US. To do that, we estimated elasticities by sector using a gravity structural model, computed US preference on bilateral basis, investigated alternative scenarios for properly measuring effects agreements international trade. Results showed that removal all preferences might lead negative net effect $41,202 million (2% predicted trade), indicating actual structure tariffs generates diversion less efficient exporters destroys flows, even if differs sector.