Search Results
Journal Article
Free versus fair trade: the dumping issue
Trade liberalization has had little effect on the use of antidumping tariffs - tariffs imposed on imports judged by a government to be unfairly priced. As more countries resort to such tariffs, questions arise about the merits of this form of trade protection, particularly when other remedies are available to industries hurt by import competition.
Journal Article
Income taxes as reciprocal tariffs
This article shows the equivalence between tariffs on international trade and income taxation. Traditionally, income taxes have been seen as lowering society's output through the household's labor-leisure trade-off. Income taxes also reduce the degree to which individuals specialize in market activity, which is similar to the way countries respond to tariffs in international trade. Income taxes discourage individuals from specializing in activities that reflect their comparative advantage. In so doing, income taxes may have their most distorting effects, not by encouraging individuals to ...
Journal Article
Recent trade liberalization in developing countries: the effects on global trade and output
Many developing countries are currently easing import tariffs and other barriers to trade. This article estimates the impact of these reforms on international trade flows and global output under alternative assumptions about the ability of developing countries to finance increased import purchases. Particular attention is given to the effect of these reforms on the U.S. economy. The author also considers how the trade policies of the United States and other industrialized countries may influence the trade and output effects of the reforms.
Report
The fruits of free trade
Working Paper
Income taxes as reciprocal tariffs
Journal Article
An introduction to non-tariff barriers to trade
Working Paper
Establishment heterogeneity, exporter dynamics, and the effects of trade liberalization
The authors study the effects of tariffs in a dynamic variation of the Melitz (2003) model, a monopolistically competitive model with heterogeneity in productivity across establishments and fixed costs of exporting. With fixed costs of starting to export that are on average 3.7 times as large as the costs incurred to continue as an exporter, the model can match both the size distribution of exporters and annual transition in and out of exporting among US manufacturing establishments. The authors find that the tariff equivalent of these fixed costs is nearly 30 percentage points. They use the ...
Report
Can vertical specialization explain the growth of world trade?
The growth in the trade share of output is one of the most important features of the world economy since World War II. The growth is generally thought to have been generated by falling tariff barriers worldwide. This thinking, however, does not square with standard static and dynamic international trade models. Because tariff barriers have decreased little since the early 1960s, these models cannot explain the growth of trade without assuming counterfactually large elasticities of substitution between domestic and foreign goods. I show that this growth can be reconciled with the relatively ...