Economic Theory and International Trade begins with an examination of classical trade theory and welfare economics. It goes on to discuss international trade policy, including international trading agreements, taxation, tariffs and quotas. Attention then turns to the role of market structure in...

This paper introduces the concept of a steepest ascent tariff reform for a small open economy. By construction, it is locally optimal in that it yields the highest gain in utility of any feasible tariff reform vector of the same length. Accordingly, it provides a convenient benchmark for the...

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...

This paper provides a framework for the empirical analysis of the role of uncertain international prices for the Australian economy’s production sector and its international trade. We model the movement of traded goods prices via a bivariate GARCH model and embed this within an expected...

We examine in detail the circumstances under which reciprocity, as defined in Bagwell and Staiger (1999), leads to fixed world prices. We show that a change of tariffs satisfying reciprocity does not necessarily imply constant world prices in a world of many goods and countries. While it is...