The primary purpose of the paper is to provide characterizations of the conditions for welfare improvements in several situations that have received very little attention in the existing literature. The first aim is to exhibit the gains that can accrue to a country from the elimination of excess...

Customs unions constitute agreements to engage in free intra-union trade and to levy common external tariffs on trade with nonmembers. Existing theoretical models do not agree on how the common external tariffs are chosen. In this paper, a model of customs union formation is developed in which...

The paper analyzes environmental tax policy reform using a competitive model of world trade that includes production-generated environmental damage (pollution) and trade tariffs. The authors examine the feasibility of Pareto-improving multilateral reforms of environmental taxes, and show that...

The paper studies the welfare implications of temporary foreign aid in the context of a simple two-country model of trade. In addition to its usual effects, a transfer of income in one period is assumed to influence the preferences of the recipient country in the following period. The implied...