Download or read book Regionalism In Trade Policy Essays On Preferential Trading written by Arvind Panagariya and published by World Scientific Publishing Company. This book was released on 1999-10-18 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and recent expansions of the European Union have led to renewed efforts to create preferential trade areas (PTAs) around the world including Asia, Africa and Latin America. Because PTAs liberalize trade with union members but not the rest of the world, they are not necessarily a healthy development. By dividing the world into trade blocs, they also threaten to undermine the multilateral trading system.This collection of recently published essays by a leading critic of regionalism offers an assessment of the economic impact of PTAs on member countries and the world. The first set of essays present a theoretical analysis of the issues using simple economic models, and study the relationship between regionalism and multilateralism. Subsequent essays evaluate the role of PTAs in Asia, North America and Latin America. The general theme of the book is that, on balance, trade liberalization through PTAs is a mistake. Trade diversion, and the creation of complicated and discriminatory tariff regimes with increased tariffs for non-member countries — the consequences of PTAs — are likely to undermine the multilateral trading system.The book will be useful to academics as well as policy makers and policy analysts. Many of the essays have been featured in newspapers and journals such as the Financial Times, Economist, Journal of Commerce and International Herald Tribune. Some of these essays are already on many reading lists in the United States.

Download or read book From Here to Free Trade written by Ernest H. Preeg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-05-13 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his new book, Ernest Preeg analyzes international trade and investment in the 1990s and lays out a comprehensive U.S. trade strategy for the uncertain period ahead. He examines the influence of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and argues that economic globalization is beneficial to the U.S. economy in the short- to medium-term while raising important questions about national sovereignty and security over the longer term. Preeg believes regional free trade agreements will soon encompass the majority of world trade, but they can conflict with the WTO's multilateral objectives. The central challenge for U.S. trade strategy, then, is to integrate the now largely separate multilateral and regional tracks of the world trading system. The first essay assesses U.S. interests in economic globalization, the second examines recent steps toward free trade at the multilateral and regional levels, and the next three offer an in-depth critique of U.S. regional free trade objectives in the Americas, across the Pacific, and possibly with Europe. The final essay presents a multilateral/regional synthesis for going from here to free trade over the coming decade.

Download or read book Essays on the Impact of Trade Policy written by Anita Narendra Srivastava and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Trade Policies written by Mengqi Wang and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation aims to comprehensively analyze the influence of government policies in international markets on agent decisions, as well as the broader macroeconomic implications of these policies. Reducing trade costs significantly affects how resources and economic activities are distributed spatially. Yet, internal frictions, particularly common in developing countries, obstruct efficient resource allocation across regions. Developing nations address this by combining trade liberalization with internal reforms or subsidies. Understanding how these reductions in trade costs and the mitigation of internal frictions interact is crucial for assessing policy effectiveness, especially regarding export outcomes. In Chapter One, titled "Spatial Implications of Trade Cost Reduction with Resource Reallocation Frictions,'' a dynamic spatial general equilibrium model is developed to study how changes in external trade costs and internal frictions affect export growth. The model incorporates costs of goods trade within and across borders, labor migration, and firms' borrowing. Using China's early 2000s reforms for calibration, the analysis shows that both external and internal reforms significantly boosted export growth, with domestic financial frictions playing a key role. Additionally, the study identifies a complementary relationship between external and internal factors, emphasizing the importance of addressing financial frictions and capital accumulation to enhance the effectiveness of trade cost reduction. The redistribution of resources among firms is another reason economic frictions may impede export growth following reductions in external trade costs. Chapter Two, titled "Internal Reforms, Trade Liberalization, and Labor Market Outcomes in China,'' investigates how changes in trade costs and the size of the state-owned sector influence unemployment rates and job turnovers. Using a small open economy model, calibrated with early 2000s reforms in China, I find that reducing trade costs alone has minimal impact on labor markets without concurrent reductions in the state-owned sector size. This chapter underscores the complementary effect, emphasizing the enhanced labor market adjustments resulting from trade cost reductions combined with reductions in the state-owned sector size. Recent trade tensions have underscored the risks associated with policy-induced geoeconomic fragmentation, emphasizing the importance of understanding complex global supply chains and trade partnerships. Chapter Three, titled "Trade Diversion Effects from Global Tensions'' (co-authored with Swarnali Ahmed Hannan), estimates the trade diversion effect on Mexico's exports to the United States during the 2018 U.S.-China trade tensions. We find positive trade diversion effects, with the U.S. shifting imports from China to Mexico, particularly for products affected by U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods. However, limited evidence suggests significant transmission of the trade diversion effect through input-output linkages in the short run.

Download or read book The Structure and Evolution of Recent U S Trade Policy written by Robert E. Baldwin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The trade policies addressed in this book have far-reaching effects on the world's increasingly interdependent economies, but until now little research has been devoted to them. This volume represents the first systematic effort to analyze specific U.S. trade policies, particularly nontariff measures. It provides a better understanding of how trade policies operate, how effective they are, and what their costs and benefits are to trading nations. The contributors chart the history of U.S. trade policy since World War II, analyze industry-specific trade barriers, and discuss the effects of tariff preferences and export-promoting policies such as export credits and domestic international sales corporations (DISCs). The final section of essays examines the worldwide impact of import policies, pointing out subtleties in industry-specific policies and providing insight into the levels of protection in developing countries. The contributors blend state-of-the-art economics with language that is accessible to the business community, economists, and policymakers. Commentaries accompany each paper.

Download or read book Current Issues In Global Agricultural And Trade Policy Essays In Honour Of Timothy E Josling written by David Blandford and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current Issues in Global Agricultural and Trade Policy presents an authoritative perspective on matters that will contribute to the future shape of global markets for agricultural products. Written by a rare grouping of eminent and globally leading agricultural economists from a wide variety of backgrounds, the book provides an analytical overview of the academic and professional work of the late Timothy E Josling, an outstanding intellectual innovator.Areas covered in the book include farm policies of the EU and the USA, analysis of farm support and its effects, US trade policy for agricultural products, analysis of food security, implications of sanitary and phytosanitary measures, and relevance of geographical indications in international trade. The implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for agricultural trade policy are discussed in an endnote. This book throws light on some of the most impressive achievements of the agricultural economics profession.

Download or read book The Effects of General Policy Uncertainty on Trade Flows and U S Wages written by Tian Liu and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays at the crossroads of international trade and the labor market. We measure the degree of uncertainty using a general and well-established methodology based on Baker et al. (2016). We investigate the degree to which trade policy uncertainty (TPU) at the industry-country-year level affects the global trade flows of major importers and exporters (e.g., the U.S., Canada, China, Mexico, and the European Union). Similarly, we construct the U.S. index of economic uncertainty at the industry-year level to investigate its effects on U.S. wages. In the first essay, we use a text-mining approach to construct a general index of trade policy uncertainty (TPU) for the U.S. and some of its main trade partners. This TPU index captures uncertainty on U.S. trade policy at a very detailed level (partner and industry levels) from 2001 to 2017 based on US trade-related news information. It's general, thereby enabling us to control for uncertainty relative to the use of highly-regulated tariff barriers under the WTO, temporary trade barriers (TTB), export restrictions, and potential reinterpretations of trade-related national security concerns, among others. Results suggest that a one-standard-deviation increase in policy uncertainty tends to decrease U.S. imports by 1.14 percent. In contrast, uncertainty on the trade policy applied by U.S. trade partners tends to reduce U.S. exports only to markets where the importers display a significant market power level. The results also show that the effects of trade policy uncertainty are mitigated with the formation of preferential trade arrangements (PTAs). In the second essay, motivated by the important findings of U.S. TPU effects on U.S. trade flows, we extend the study to another four markets, namely, Canada, Mexico, China, and the European Union, and their trade partners. We construct a TPU index for each of these four markets based on their news information using the same method applied to the first essay. Again, this TPU index captures uncertainty on the trade policies of these four markets at the importer-exporter-industry level from 2001 to 2017. The primary findings of the second essay are very much in line with the previous results. Uncertainty on the trade policy implemented by Canada, Mexico, China, and the EU tends to lower their imports. Specifically, a one-standard-deviation increase in policy uncertainty is associated with a decline of 0.71 percent in their imports. Moreover, uncertainty on the trade policy applied by the trade partners of these four groups is more likely to reduce their exports. Specifically, a one-standard-deviation increase in TPU leads to a decline of 0.62 percent in these four markets' exports. The impact of trade policy uncertainty on imports and exports for each of the four markets is also negative. In addition, PTAs tend to mitigate the negative effect of trade uncertainties on these four markets' trade flows. In the third essay, we study the reaction of the labor market to the economic uncertainty in the U.S. We specifically construct the U.S. economic uncertainty index with the same method we used to create the TPU in the previous two chapters on wages. The economic uncertainty index is generated based on U.S. economic-related news information that captures uncertainty on U.S. economic events and policies at the industry level from 2001 to 2018. Interestingly, the increase in economic uncertainty is likely to reduce wages in the U.S. labor market. Our result shows that the total effects of the concurrent and lagged economic uncertainty indexes cause a decline in wages by 2.12 percent. We also get plausible results by constructing alternative U.S. economic uncertainty indices using 1) newspapers released by other countries and 2) other countries' economic uncertainty indexes as instruments.

Download or read book Trade Policy Reforms and Development written by S. K. Jayasuriya and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two volumes incorporate major new papers contributed by leading international economists, on a range of topics that reflect the breadth of Professor Lloyd's own distinguished contributions to the field of international trade and policy during a career spanning over four decades.

Download or read book Essays on the Causes and Consequences of Trade Policies written by Lorenzo Rotunno and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Trade Policy Trade Agreements and Economic Growth Essays in International Trade Theory written by Eric W. Bond and published by World Scientific Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-04-30 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains the main contributions of Eric Bond in the areas of international trade policy, trade agreements, and economic growth. The central focus of this volume is the author's pioneering work on the role of differences in market power across countries in explaining incentives to join preferential trade agreements and the form of trade agreements. Other topics include the interactions of physical and human capital accumulation in determining trade patterns and growth rates and the impact of non-tariff measures on international trade and investment. The volume also gives insights into the role of firm heterogeneity in domestic and international trade.

Download or read book The Effects of U S Trade Protection and Promotion Policies written by Robert C. Feenstra and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economists disagree on whether recent U.S. trade policies are harmful or helpful, but they all agree that there is a new trend toward focusing on results-oriented policies in specific markets and with particular trading partners. These twelve essays by leading international economists explore crucial issues in U.S. trade policy today. Topics examined include the markets for automobile and automobile parts in the United States and Japan, the U.S. response to "unfair" trading practices such as dumping, and the effects of industry- and country-specific policies. Examples include high-technology and agricultural industries and off-shore assembly in U.S. border cities. The volume concludes that some policies can act to both protect imports and promote exports, that the threat of protectionist policies can often have effects that are as pronounced as their implementation, and that regulatory policy has as great an impact on trade and investment patterns as does trade policy itself. It will be of crucial interest to international trade economists, policy specialists, and political scientists.

Download or read book Essays on the International Trading System written by Pradeep S. Mehta and published by Cameron May. This book was released on 2004 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Trade Policy with Supply Chains written by Ayako Obashi and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chapter entitled ``Trade Policy and Production Location with Cross-Border Unbundling'' sheds new light on the trade policy implications of production relocation by featuring the effects of export restrictions on intermediate inputs on the downstream final-good producer's location and sourcing decision. The chapter revisits governments' incentives to use trade policies in a theoretical framework considering the firm's global production operation subject to a combination of trade costs, inclusive of trade barriers, imposed on different stages of production process. An interrelationship between trade policies through production linkage gives rise to a novel, assembly-relocation motive for policy intervention against trade in intermediates. A government may use an export tax on intermediates as a way to attract the final assembly so that conditional on the assembly relocation it can maximize its ability to manipulate the international terms of trade. The second chapter entitled ``Trade Agreements with Cross-Border Unbundling'' and the third chapter entitled ``Revisiting Profit-Shifting Trade Policy Intervention under Cross-Border Unbundling'' revisit the purpose and design of trade agreements in the presence of cross-border unbundling of production. The second chapter features an interrelationship among market-clearing prices of final goods and the associated domestic and imported intermediates due to their dependence on trade policies through production linkage. There arises a local price externality, and a government uses a combination of trade policies to manipulate the local equilibrium price for domestically-sourced intermediates in the trading partner country to its advantage. The third chapter focuses on the trade policy implications of international profit-shifting, and detects another form of local price externality. Here I show that a government unilaterally chooses an inefficient mix of trade policies on final goods and the associated intermediates to manipulate its local prices so as to induce international profit-shifting in its favor. Both chapters call for the potential of trade agreements beyond the conventional market-access argument associated with the terms-of-trade theory. To achieve globally efficient outcomes through trade agreements, I propose to specify the market access using the trade-weighted version of terms of trade so that governments effectively coordinate in changing the value-added created from trade within production chains in a reciprocal manner.

Download or read book Essays on International Trade and International Political Economy written by Thomas Zylkin and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My graduate research has been organized around two main themes: (i) the causes and consequences of trade integration and (ii) the strategic nature of armed conflict. The expansion of international trade over the past sixty years has played a major role is determining the fates of nations, both for better and for worse, and likewise has the potential to shape our futures in ways we need to be able to anticipate. Similarly, the death, destruction, and diversion of productive resources associated with violent conflict continue to present a critical obstacle to shared prosperity. The papers I am presenting as the chapters of my dissertation are representative of the contributions I am interested in making in these important research areas. My research on trade integration spans both the micro-level of what forms trade integration may take as well as higher level concerns about how freer trade will affect both the world economy as well as the individual economies within it. Two chapters of my dissertation, "Beyond Tariffs: Quantifying Heterogeneity in the Effects of Free Trade Agreements" and "Finding the Influence of Communication on Trade" are devoted to this subject. In "Beyond Tariffs", for example, I show, using NAFTA as an empirical case study, that the effects of free trade agreements on individual nations may not be what we might expect to observe ex ante based on tariffs. Relying solely on tariffs to project NAFTA's effects not only greatly underestimates the overall welfare increases for all three NAFTA countries--Mexico's in particular--but also overstates the positive effects of NAFTA on U.S. producer prices. It follows that "heterogeneity" in the effects of free trade agreements, both within and across agreements, may not be well-understood. In "Finding the Influence of Communication", I investigate whether the sharing of a common language promotes trade in a way similar to trade policy and, if so, what the consequences of increased language learning will be for global trade. Most notably, I find the effect of communication in native languages on trade tends to be underestimated in the absence of controls for communication in non-native languages. Surprisingly, while I find strong evidence for the causal impact of foreign language acquisition on manufacturing trade, I do not find similarly strong evidence for services trade. I also find that, unsurprisingly, adding to the world's population of English speakers has by far the largest impact on trade of any major world language. Interestingly, however, when I remove all non-language barriers to trade, I find the forces of geography and history may have greatly impeded the relative appeal of Chinese as a competing global language. The third chapter of my dissertation, "The Problem of Peace: A Story of Corruption, Destruction, and Rebellion", joint with Constantinos Syropoulos, deals with a different kind of question: what are the economic incentives that drive the emergence of destructive conflicts, and of intra-state conflicts ("civil conflicts") in particular? Specifically, we investigate how the central presence of state (fiscal) institutions in civil conflicts generates unique explanations for the emergence of conflict itself. International trade plays an important role in this chapter as well, but mainly as a backdrop for illustrating the unique trade-offs between "peace" and "welfare" that may arise in this context. It is possible for changes in international prices to move in favor of promoting settlements, but such settlements can be associated with (socially wasteful) increases in arming and/or taxation. We also explore, among other things, how limiting the government's fiscal capacity may tilt the balance towards peaceful settlement.

Download or read book Essays on the Dynamic Effects of International Trade Policy written by Shafaat Yar Khan and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation is comprised of three essays regarding the dynamic effects of changes in trade policy at the firm-level and in the aggregate. The study aims to understand the effects of policy changes when they happen with certainty and when they are uncertain. In the first chapter, we study how anticipation to policy changes overstates the estimated elasticity of substitution, the most important parameter in international trade. Standard identification of this parameter uses tariff variation from Free Trade Agreements (FTA) and assumes that trade flows equal their consumption. However, FTAs eliminate tariffs gradually through announced phaseouts. This allows firms to delay their purchases until tariff cuts are effective while consuming their inventories. Indeed, during NAFTA's staged tariff reductions, imports experienced sizable anticipatory slumps followed by liberalization bumps. A trade model with inventories replicates these dynamics and illustrates that consumed imports provide unbiased estimates of the elasticity of substitution. We propose an empirical measure of consumed imports validated through Monte Carlo simulations. Application to the data shows that using imports instead of consumed imports overestimates the annual elasticity by 68%, the average elasticity by 16%, and increases the ratio of the long- to short-run response from 2 to 3.5. In the second chapter, we study the effects on trade from the annual tariff uncertainty about China's MFN status renewal prior to joining the WTO. We have four main findings. First, in monthly data trade increases significantly in anticipation of uncertain future increases in tariffs. Second, the probability of a tariff increase was perceived to be relatively small, with an average annual probability of non-renewal of about 6 percent. Third, what matters more is the expected future tariff rather than the uncertainty around it. We identify these effects using within-year variation in the risk of trade policy changes around the renewal vote and trade flows. We show that an (s, s) inventory model generates this behavior and that variation in the strength of the stockpiling in advance of the vote is increasing in the storability of goods. Fourth, the costs associated with within year trade policy induced stockpiling account for around 30% of the trade dampening effects of uncertainty found in annual data. Our results explain why trade may hold up in advance of a prospective policy change such as Brexit or the US-China escalating tariff war of 2018-19 but may fall off sharply even if expected tariff increases do not materialize. The third chapter highlights the overestimation of the productivity-enhancing effect of tariff reductions that arise due to a measurement issue. Tariff liberalizations and the associated input tariffs reductions have been documented to result in increased firm level productivity. This is because input tariff reductions shift the composition of firms' inputs towards imported goods. However, foreign inputs entail higher inventory holding costs relative to domestic inputs. We show that neglecting increased inventory costs leads to an upward bias in the productivity gains from trade liberalizations. We build a model of different inventory intensity of home and foreign inputs and show that under standard accounting practices the effect of input tariffs on productivity is biased. The use of estimated inventory deflators based on observables eliminates the bias. We study the relevance of this potential bias during India's trade liberalization in the early 1990s. We find that inventory holdings increased significantly with reduced inputs tariffs and that not accounting for increased inventory costs overestimates TFP gains by around 35%"--Pages ix-x.

Download or read book Essays on the Macroeconomic Effects of International Trade Policy written by Carter Mix and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation is comprised of two essays regarding the way that aggregate economies respond to changes in international trade policy. Both chapters use quantitative models to determine the predicted effects of changes in either tariffs or trade costs on several aggregate variables. In the first chapter, I develop a multi-country heterogeneous firm model to study the aggregate effects of multilateral trade policy over time. The model captures the slow evolution of production and trade networks in response to trade policy as firms make durable and irreversible investments in sourcespecific productive capacity and destination-specific exporting capacity. It also incorporates capital, international assets, firms, and endogenous labor supply while still matching world geography. The model is calibrated to match size and trade flows of the US and its major trade partners as well as the split of trade between consumption, capital, and material goods. I find that the short run fluctuations in the economy following a policy change are a key determinant of the overall gains from trade and that transitions are not simply represented by gradual convergence to a new steady state. Futhermore, I find that the long-run effects of trade are poorly approximated by quantitative models without dynamics. While all the model features are important, the behavior of the domestic economy in the short- and long-run relies most on the semi-fixed trade networks and intertemporal trade incentives. The model is used to evaluate the effects on the US of being left out permanently or temporarily from a world trade liberalization. Being left out is quite costly, with losses in utility concentrated in the initial periods of the liberalization. The second chapter studies the importance of expectations and news regarding trade policy on the macroeconomy. We evaluate the aggregate effects of changes in trade barriers in a model in which trade responds gradually to changes in trade policy and trade policy changes are gradual. Our model offers insights into how changing trade barriers affects the economy and how business cycle shocks can affect trade. We find that a fall in current trade barriers has an expansionary effect while a decline in future trade costs can be recessionary on impact due to a wealth effect. Furthermore, canceling agreed upon declines in barriers is expansionary in the short-run but substantially lowers growth over the medium run. We also find that even controlling for composition, trade tends to lag the recovery in demand for tradables. We propose a method to separately identify expected and unexpected movements in trade costs. A dynamic model of trade requires both aggregate and forward-looking data to accurately identify the source of trade cost variation"--Pages vi-vii.

Download or read book Essays in International Trade and Public Economics written by Margarita M. Kalamova and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 2012 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays of this book are contributions to the empirical Literature in International Trade and Public Economics. They deal with the relationship between the structure and quality of the public sector and the process of economic integration. Two of the essays add to the empirical determinants of trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) and to the numerous applications of the theory of government decentralization. Decentralization tends to discourage inward FDI and domestic trade and to increase imports and exports. A third essay focuses on the effect of governments' intangible assets - such as consumer perceptions about countries and products from these countries - on FDI. A country's nation brand is shown to have a significant and large positive effect on investment flows.