The Lerner Symmetry Theorem (Lerner, 1936) establishes the equivalence between import tariffs and export taxes in a simple neoclassical economy with two countries, two final goods, and no trade costs. In this paper we provide a number of generalizations and qualifications of this well-known...

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...

The large trade and current account deficits of the United States cannot continue indefinitely because doing so would constitute a permanent gift to the U.S. economy. The process that will cause this gift to shrink and that will eventually cause it to reverse is a fall in the dollar. The dollar...

Given the rapidly growing reserves in Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan) and the pressures from trading partners to revalue, there is a need to examine commercial policy in more than a pure barter model. Here we evaluate the joint impacts of exchange rate appreciation on trade flows and country...

The sharp gyrations of the dollar and of the trade deficit in the 1980s were among the most novel and least understood economic developments of the decade. This paper, which was written as part of the NBER project on American economic policy in the 1980s, examines the reasons for the dollar's...

We investigate the role of trade imbalances for the distributional consequences of globalization. We do so through the lens of a quantitative, general equilibrium, multi-country, multi-sector model of trade with four key ingredients: (a) workers with different levels of skills are organized into...

Export taxes, despite being applied by several countries, have not received the same scrutiny in multilateral trade negotiations as other trade barriers. This work seeks to provide more detail into the linkages between export taxes, trade, food prices, and poverty in the agriculture sector. We...

The United States produced about 80 percent of the world's cotton in the decades prior to the Civil War. How much monopoly power did the United States possess in the world cotton market and what would have been the effect of an optimal export tax? This paper estimates the elasticity of foreign...

This paper looks at the problem of making multiple lending decisions which affect the supply of the product when the consequences of these lending decisions are interrelated via the effect on the world price of the product. This is termed the 'adding up problem'. It is argued that thinking of...

This paper studies two episodes where an exporting industry saw its sales plummet after importing countries banned their products to protect their citizens' health. The first case is the poisoned grapes crisis involving Chile and the United States in 1989. The second is the mad cows dispute...