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Foreign trade zones: growth amid controversy
Working Paper
How much of South Korea's growth miracle can be explained by trade policy?
South Korea's growth miracle has been well documented. A large set of institutional and policy reforms in the early 1960s is thought to have contributed to the country's extraordinary performance. In this paper, the authors assess the importance of one key set of policies, the trade policy reforms in Korea, as well as the concurrent GATT tariff reductions. They develop a model of neoclassical growth and trade that highlights two forces by which lower trade barriers can lead to increased per worker GDP: comparative advantage and specialization, and capital accumulation. The authors calibrate ...
Working Paper
Enlargement and common external tariff in a political-economic model of customs union
We present a model with three blocks of nations: two of the blocks are members of a Customs Union (CU) and maintain a common external tariff (CET) on the third (non member). One of the member blocks is a block of new entrants. The producing lobby is assumed to be union-wide and lobbies governments of both blocks to influence the CET. The CET is determined jointly by the CU. We follow the political support function approach, where the CU seeks to maximize a weighted sum of the constituents? payoff functions. In this framework, we find the relationship between the CET and the average level of ...
Working Paper
Corruption and trade protection: evidence from panel data
This paper provides new estimates of the effects of corruption and poor institutions on trade protection. It exploits data on several measures of trade protection including import duty, international trade taxes, and the trade-GDP ratio. The paper complements the literature on the relationship between corruption and trade reform. It deviates from the previous literature in several ways. First, unobserved heterogeneity among countries have been controlled with properly specified fixed effects exploiting the time dimension present in the dataset. Secondly, instead of using tariff and non-tariff ...
Working Paper
Political asymmetry and common external tariff in a customs union
We present a three-nation model, where two of the nations are members of a Customs Union (CU) and maintain a common external tariff (CET) on the third (non-member) nation. The producing lobby is assumed to be union-wide and lobbies both governments to influence the CET. The CET is determined jointly by the CU. We follow the political support function approach, where the CU seeks to maximize a weighted sum of the constituents? payoff functions, the weights reflecting the influence of the respective governments in the CU. A central finding of this paper is that the CET rises monotonically with ...
Working Paper
Cross-border lobbying in preferential trading agreements: implications for external tariffs
This paper examines the effect of cross-border lobbying on domestic lobbying and on external tariffs in both Customs Union (CU) and Free Trade Area (FTA). We do so by developing a two-stage game which endogenizes the tariff formation function in a political economic model of the directly unproductive rent-seeking activities type. We find that cross-border lobbying unambiguously increases both domestic lobbying and the equilibrium common external tariffs in a CU. The same result also holds for FTA provided tariffs for the member governments are strategic complements. We also develop a specific ...
Working Paper
Tariff risk and international borrowing with incomplete asset markets.
When residents of two countries have access to complete contingent claims markets, the welfare effects of changes in tariffs are opposite to those found in static trade theory. This paper demonstrates that a much simpler asset market structure can be sufficient to generate such a result. In the context of a two period model with asset trade restricted to simple bonds, I decompose wealth and substitution effects that underlying the impact oftariff changes on consumption and the current account. Use of this relatively simple model helps to provide intuitive insight and facilitates the use of an ...
Working Paper
Tariffs and asset market structure: some basic comparative dynamics
Stockman and Dellas (1986) demonstrated that in the presence of complete international asset markets, the relative welfare implications of a small tariffare reversed from standard trade theory. This paper examines the robustness of that result to change in preference parameters and asset market structure. For nearly all values of substitution elasticity and risk aversion, the reversal remains. For very low risk aversion, however, equilibrium outcomes resemble Lerner or Metzler tariffparadoxes. In the latter case, the tariff-imposing country is made better-off. Implications of asset market ...