The latest World Bank estimates of real GDP per capita for China are significantly lower than previous ones. We review possible sources of this puzzle and conclude that it reflects a combination of factors, including substitution bias in consumption, reliance on urban prices which we estimate...

The elasticity of substitution between goods from different countries—the Armington elasticity—is important for many questions in international economics, but its magnitude is subject to debate: the "macro" elasticity between home and import goods is often found to be smaller than the...

This paper argues that the theoretical foundations for the gravity equation are general, while the empirical performance of the gravity equation is specific to the type of goods examined. Most existing theory for the gravity equation depends on the assumption of differentiated goods. We show...

This paper develops a procedure to rank-order countries and commodities using disaggregated US imports data. It finds strong evidence that both countries and commodities can be ranked, consistent with the ‘product cycle’ hypothesis. Countries habitually begin to export goods to the United...

Since the early 1990s, numerous countries have adopted or strengthened competition legislation. In this Paper we investigate the impact of competition law on industry markups over time and across a large number of countries. We find both domestic and foreign competition to be major sources of...

Actual and potential competition is a powerful source of discipline on the pricing behavior of firms with market power. A simple model is developed that shows that the effects of import competition and domestic entry regulation on industry price-cost markups depend on country size. Barriers to...

To study the effects of tariffs on GDP one needs import demand elasticities at the tariff line level that are consistent with GDP maximization. These do not exist. We modify Kohli’s (1991) GDP function approach to estimate demand elasticities for 4625 imported goods in 117 countries. Following...

The objective of this paper is to provide indicators of trade restrictiveness that include both measures of tariff and non-tariff barriers for 91 developing and developed countries. For each country, we estimate three trade restrictiveness indices. The first one captures the extent to which...

This Paper assesses the foreign lobbying forces behind the tariff preferences that the United States grants to Latin American countries. The basic framework is one developed by Grossman and Helpman (1994) that is extended to explain the relationship between foreign lobbying and tariff...