This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization in terms of tariff cuts within the Eastern European enlargement on German and Austrian firm productivity. Unique matching of data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that tariff reductions raise parent firm productivity significantly. A ten percentage point decrease in tariff rates can lead to total factor productivity gains of up to 2 percent. The d...

This paper examines how a tariff affects firms’ efforts to produce safer foods that are supplied to consumers whose preference for safety of foods are different. I analyze the optimal trade policy for importing country that can impose a tariff or a subsidy on the foods. I show that the raise in tariff rate makes importing country’s firm chooses less effort to produce safer foods but foreign fir...

We examine South’s incentive to protect IPR in a North-South duopoly model where (i) the North firm owns a better technology and has the option of serving the South market via exports or FDI, and (ii) the South firm can invest in absorptive capacity to reduce the technology gap. While FDI by North firm makes absorption easier for South, investment in absorptive capacity by the South firm might ...

Using firm level data from the U.S. steel industry, we find that lobbying for import protection is habit forming. Controlling for firm performance and other factors, past lobbying increases the likelihood of current lobbying in our full sample. Expecting heterogeneity in lobbying behavior among firms, we let an EM algorithm sort our firms into groups with different propensities to lobby. A two-...

Government budget balance forces the endogenous use of distortionary tax instruments when an exogenous reform is implemented. The aggregate efficiency of such reforms is based on comparisons of simple summary measures of the Marginal Cost of Funds of the various tariff or quota changes with the Marginal Cost of Funds of the alternative taxes, or of the Marginal Benefit of Government supplied go...

Recent global initiatives on debt relief and development assistance call for increasing aid for trade to the poorest countries. We apply a multi-country computable general equilibrium model, to analyze if aid for trade offers the possibility that, instead of the developing and least developed countries’ being worse off—as so many were as the result of the last round of trade negotiations—they w...

The objective of the paper is to explore and give an overview of two central policy alternatives to improve the integration between the European Union and developing countries by removing barriers to trade: trade preferences and trade facilitation. After reviewing the relevant literatures and discussing the issues which constitute problems or opportunities for practitioners and researchers in b...

Recent research has underlined the efficiency of the GATT/WTO rules from the standpoint of politically motivated governments, emphasizing that the current multilateral rules are capable of delivering a politically efficient equilibrium. Such an equilibrium is, however, economically inefficient. Global free trade, in particular, is generally unattainable even in a fully cooperative world, provid...

This paper documents patterns in international trade costs in processed foods for a large cross-section of developing and developed countries, during the 1976-2000 period. A trade costs index is inferred from a micro-founded gravity equation that incorporates bilateral ‘iceberg’ trade costs. For 2000, the weighted average tariff equivalent of trade costs ranges from 73% for the North to 134% fo...