Several of the recently negotiated regional trade agreements (Canada-U.S., NAFTA, E.C.-Hungary/Poland/Czeck and Slovak Republics) contain significantly fewer concessions by the large countries to smaller countries than vice versa. Yet, it is small countries that have sought them and see...

We discuss most favoured nation (MFN) treatment in trade agreements, suggesting that its value to individual countries depends critically on the relevant model solution concept used to evaluate it. We analyze both rights to MFN treatment in foreign markets, and the obligation to grant MFN...

This paper discusses the implications of rents and regulations which support them for the design of indirect taxes such as VATS. Intuition suggests high tax rates on industries or products with rents; but we argue that whether rents are natural (due to fixed factors) or market structure related...

Recent literature has explored both physical and policy linkage between trade and environment. Here we explore linkage through leverage in bargaining, whereby developed countries can use trade policy threats to achieve improved developing country environmental management, while developing...

This paper presents numerical simulation results that suggest that China can both reduce its trade imbalance and receive welfare benefits by switching the value added tax (VAT) regime from the current destination principle to an origin principle. With the tax on exports exceeding that no longer...

This paper develops a human capital measure in the sense of Schultz (1960) and then reevaluates the contribution of human capital to China's economic growth. The results indicate that human capital plays a much more important role in China's economic growth than available literature suggests,...

We document and discuss the implications of a sharp increase in the regional dispersion of skill premia in China in recent years. This has previously been little noted or discussed. We use three urban household surveys for 1995, 2002, and 2007 and estimate skill premia at provincial and city...

This paper revisits the long-standing issue of the incidence of taxes in developing countries. Its central theme is that despite many decades of studies, tax incidence analyses for developing countries continue to be based upon the same shifting assumptions used in developed country studies,...

The conventional wisdom is that taxing individuals rather than households is superior from an efficiency point of view under progressive income taxation. This is because it leads to secondary workers, whose labour supply elasticity is high, being taxed at a lower marginal rate than primary...

This paper argues that whether estimates of the welfare cost of natural or artificial trade barriers that do not discriminate by quality are subject to positive or negative specification bias when using models which do not explicitly recognize quality variation depends on the reference point...