Standards and technical regulations which govern the admissibility of imported goods into an economy raise costs of exporters entering new markets, and may have a particularly high impact on firms seeking to export from developing countries. Yet standards may also have a positive side, such as...

Innovative activity is highly concentrated in a handful of advanced countries. These same countries are also the major exporters of capital goods to the rest of the world. We develop a model of trade in capital goods to assess its role spreading the benefits of technological advances. Applying...

This paper develops and characterizes an index of trade policy restrictiveness defined as the uniform tariff equivalent which maintains the same volume of trade as a given set of tariffs, quota, and domestic taxes and subsidies. We relate this volume-equivalent index to the Trade Restrictiveness...

We use disaggregated data on trade flows, production, and trade barriers for 41 countries in 1988 to examine the political and economic determinants of non-tariff barriers, as well as the impact of protection (both tariff and non-tariff) on trade flows. We use an econometric framework that...

Increasing complexity of regulation over time is a regular empirical phenomenon whenever political processes attempt to control economic activity. In this paper it is argued that a tendency toward increasing complexity of controls is probably inherent in most efforts to regulate, and that the...

This paper examines the effects of auctioning quota licenses when monopoly power exists. With a foreign monopoly and domestic competition the sales of licenses will raise any revenue if domestic and foreign markets are segmented. More surprisingly, the inability to raise revenue is shown to...

This paper examines the effects of auctioning quota licenses when market power exists. The overall conclusion is that with oligopolistic markets, quotas, even when set optimally and with quota licenses auctioned off, are - unlikely to dominate free trade. Moreover, auction quotas only strictly...

In this paper we consider a home government with political pressure to restrict trade, at the expense of foreigners. The foreign country is compensated with an income transfer, which can be thought of as a portion of the tariff revenues or quota rents. In this setting the two countries should...