Import Sensitive Products and Perverse Tariff-Rate Quota Liberalization

This paper shows that a Tariff-Rate-Quota’s (TRQ) minimum access expansion can perversely trigger domestic price increases. Often, TRQs have prohibitive over-quota tariffs to mimic import-quotas, in providing minimum market access. In the WTO’s Doha Round, it is likely that countries using TRQs will avoid aggressive tariff reductions if they increase the quota portion of TRQs. We show that when the import price lies between the unit cost of production and the price received by domestic upstream firms, an increase in import quota as a share of domestic production may cause an increase in the domestic retail price.