La gestión del presidente Hugo Chávez a casi cuatro años de gestión y un profundo deterioro de indicadores de empleo, informalidad y nivel de actividad económica, así como ante una fuga de capitales muy marcada, pretende revertir las consecuencias de una inestabilidad y desmontaje...

There are a number of ethical issues in the area of international trade that affect managers. This article will address two ethical issues that have been almost totally neglected in the literature -- antidumping and sanctions. Antidumping laws are special interest legislation. Rather than...

If, in international agreements, governments “link'' trade to environmental policy (or other issues with non-pecuniary externalities), will this promote more cooperation in both policies or will cooperation in one policy be strengthened at the expense of the other? We analyze this question in...

A strand of recent literature shows that a reform of import tariff (export tax) and consumption tax (production tax) that keeps the consumer (producer) price unchanged enhances welfare and increases revenue under plausible conditions. It has been argued that the results provide an ex-post...

A moment of consequence to the postbellum U.S. tariff debate was the 'conversion' of David Ames Wells, Commissioner of the Revenue from 1865- 1870, to free trade. When he began his work Wells was a disciple of the eminent American protectionist Henry C. Carey. By the age of forty, however, he...

In this paper we discuss the incentives of a welfare maximizing government to implement strategic trade policy when there is, on the one hand, uncertainty about the relevant market information (like the type of competition, demand function, cost function, etc.), but, on the other hand, the...

We compare the social welfare generated by a domestic government in the two types of policy setups: a "commitment" regime in which the government sets its policy instrument before the strategic choice is made by the domestic firm and a "non-commitment" regime where the policy variable is set...

In a vertically differentiated market with cost asymmetries, the risk dominance criterion selects the equilibrium where the high quality is produced by the efficient firm. We show that a sufficiently high Minimum Quality Standard reverses equilibrium selection. Hence, MQS may be used in order to...

The current consensus on indirect tax reform in developing countries favors a reduction in trade taxes with an increase in VAT to raise revenue. The theoretical results on selective reform that underlie this consensus are, however, derived from partial models that ignore the existence of an...

This paper examines the determinants of the real effective exchange rate (REER) in Brazil, from 1994 to 2003. Building on a standard theoretical model and based on the Johansen cointegration estimation, the main finding is that much of the long-run behavior of the REER can be explained by...