Quota restrictions on United States imports of apparel and textiles under the multifibre arrangement (MFA) ended abruptly in January 2005. This change in policy was large, predetermined, and fully anticipated, making it an ideal natural experiment for testing the theory of trade policy. We focus...

But the disappointments can also be attributed to the preferences because they discouraged additional value-addition in assembly and stimulated the use of expensive fabrics that were unlikely to be produced locally. When the MFA was removed, constrained countries such as China moved strongly...

This paper analyzes China's experience under U.S. apparel and textile quotas. It makes use of a unique new database that tracks U.S. trading partners' performance under the quota regimes established by the global Multifiber Arrangement (1974 to 1995) and subsequent Agreement on Textiles and...

This paper provides estimates of both national and global welfare costs of bilateral quotas on textiles and apparel using an applied general equilibrium model which covers bilateral quotas on exports of textiles and apparel negotiated between three major developed importing countries (the US,...

Using the menu-auction approach to endogenous determination of tariffs and allowing additionally for lobby formation itself to be endogenous, this paper analyzes the impact of unilateral trade liberalization by one country on its partner's trade policies. We find that such unilateral...

We consider trade between a consumer' country with an open access renewable resource and a conservationist' country that regulates resource harvesting to maximize domestic steady-state utility. In what we call the mild overuse' case, the consumer country exports the resource good and suffers...

A coalition of well-organized semiconductor producers along with compliant government agencies (USTR and the Commerce Department) brought about a 1986 trade agreement in which the United States forced Japan to end the 'dumping' of semiconductors in all world markets and to help secure 20 percent...

There is a broad consensus among US opinion leaders that our economic problem is largely one of failures of international competition -- that trade deficits have eroded our manufacturing base, that inability to sell on world markets has been a major drag on economic growth, and that imports from...

It has long been believed that international competition forces domestic firms to behave more competitively. I term this the imports-as--market-discipline hypothesis. I construct a simple static oligopoly model and estimate the model using panel data from Turkish manufacturing firms. The data...

This paper attempts a synthetic census of the calibration/counterfactual style of empirical research on the benefits of trade liberalization with imperfect competition and scale economies. Computable-general-equilibrium studies are surveyed, as are a large number of partial-equilibrium studies...