A drastic change in the marketing system of wheat in South Africa has taken place over the past decade. For the first time an import tariff on wheat was implemented in the form of a variable import levy. Traditionally, countries have implemented variable import levy schemes in order to protect domestic price guarantees by means of determining a reference price, which was generally above the dom...

In this paper, we propose a unified framework for inclusion of different electricity tariff components and residential prosumption devices in a residential energy management system (REMS). This framework allows REMS to use flexible modelling with respect to devices and price components applicable to an individual house, without requiring unique models for each device and tariff. The significanc...

This paper shows that governments have no incentive to introduce non-tariff barriers when they are free to set tariffs but they do when tariffs are determined cooperatively. We then show three results. First, with trade liberalization, there is a progression from using tariffs only to quotas, and to antidumping constraints (when quotas are jointly eliminated). Second, there is a narrowing of th...

We analyze a panel of 230 Canadian manufacturing industries to investigate whether trade liberalization promotes efficiency through increased scale. During the six years following the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, Canadian manufacturing exhibited substantial rationalization – a decline in the number of plants accompanied by increases in output per plant. We find that the bilatera...

This paper shows that when moving from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to a Customs Union (CU), the general equilibrium impacts on Canadian GDP and welfare, of removing Rules of Origin (ROO), are potentially larger than the small effects resulting from the adoption of a common external tariff (CET). Therefore, proposals for a CU should not be dismissed solely on the basis that t...

We suppose that there are two countries trading two commodities, country 1 exporting commodity 1 to country 2, and that country 1 imposes a tariff on its import of commodity 2 while country 2 remains passive and does not retaliate. We assume that preferences in country 1 are identical and homothetic. A classic theorem, going back to Mill (1844), Torrens (1844), and Bickerdike (1907), states tha...

Traditional explanations for indirect trade through an entrepôt focus on savings in transport costs and the role of specialized agents in processing and distribution. We provide an alternative perspective based on the potential for entrepôts to facilitate tariff evasion. Using data on direct exports to mainland China and indirect exports via Hong Kong SAR, we find that the indirect export rate ...

Nontariff barriers (NTBs) refer to the wide range of policy interventions other than border tariffs that affect trade of goods, services, and factors of production. Most taxonomies of NTBs include market-specific trade and domestic policies affecting trade in that market. Extended taxonomies include macro-economic policies affecting trade. NTBs have gained importance as tariff levels have been ...

The design of tariff schemes for packet-based network services, especially for Differentiated Internet Services, has turned out to be a non-trivial task. This is mainly due to the issue of how to account for the immense number of individual packets. This paper proposes a paradigm shift and argues that the solution of this feasibility problem is not a matter of coping with complexity, but instea...

The price-wedge method yields a tariff-equivalent estimate of technical barriers to trade (TBT). An extension of this method accounts for imperfect substitution between domestic and imported goods and incorporates recent findings on trade costs. We explore the sensitivity of this revamped tariff equivalent estimate to its determinants (substitution elasticity, preference for home good, trade co...