This paper shows how a world price shock can increase the likelihood that democratization must be used to resolve the threat of revolution. Initially, a ruling elite may be able to use trade policy to maintain political stability. But a world price shock can push the country into a situation...

A deranged publisher decided to produce a volume of some of my papers and asked me to write some comments. Since these amount to a summary of my views about international trade theory over the latest forty years or so, I'm giving the comments a separate alternative existence as a discussion paper

Why do politicians advocate trade protections to save domestic jobs when neoclassical trade models suggest that small open economies should implement free trade? The novel insight of this paper is that trade protections can be rationalized as a second-best policy that improves the domestic...

This paper develops a new model of trade policy under dictatorship and democratization. The paper makes two contributions. One is to provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between political institutions and economic efficiency by studying the endogenous interaction between the form...

Duty drawback schemes, which typically involve a combination of duty rebates and exemptions, are a feature of many countries' trade regimes. They are used in highly protected developing economies as means of providing exporters with imported inputs at world prices, thus increasing their...

This paper examines the trade policy response of Latin American governments to the rapid growth of China and India in world markets. To explain higher protection in sectors where a large share is imported from these countries, we extend the 'protection for sale' model to allow for different...

This paper develops a new model of trade policy under dictatorship and democratization. The paper makes two contributions. One is to provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between political institutions and economic efficiency by studying the endogenous interaction between the form...

More than 170 years ago, Frédéric Bastiat noted in his masterly work Economic Sophisms that the “opposition to free trade rests upon errors, or, if you prefer, upon half-truths.”1 Ever since Adam Smith successfully replaced mercantilist orthodoxy with free trade doctrine in his celebrated...

This paper unpacks the role of the domestic content of imports as a novel source of policy interdependence along the global supply chain. We show how a rise in local contents embodied in imports can skew national trade policy preferences, and pull upstream and downstream countries in asymmetric...

This paper unpacks the role of the domestic content of imports as a novel source of policy interdependence along the global supply chain. We show how a rise in local contents embodied in imports can skew national trade policy preferences, and pull upstream and downstream countries in asymmetric...