This paper quantifies the wide-ranging costs of potential increases in worldwide barriers to trade in two scenarios. First, a coordinated global withdrawal of tariff commitments from all existing bilateral/regional trade agreements, as well as from unilateral preferential schemes coupled with an...

Trade policy commitments to lower import tariffs and to maintain tariffs at low levels entail short and long-run political-economic costs and benefits. Empirical work examining the relationship between such commitments and the exercise of trade policy flexibilities is still relatively nascent,...

Increased international production fragmentation implies that firms at home rely on imported intermediates for production. In this context, tariff policy design needs to consider the impact downstream of changes in tariffs upstream. Policy makers embarking on tariff reforms need to answer...

The use of computable general equilibrium (CGE) simulation models for policy analysis has become widespread. However, such techniques are not well suited to economywide analysis in developing countries. Instead, simulation models relying on "borrowed" parameter estimates have been used for a...

What kinds of changes in foreign competition lead domestic industries to seek import protection? To address this question this paper uses detailed monthly U.S. import data to investigate changes in import composition during a 24-month window immediately preceding the filing of a petition for...