We study a general equilibrium model of international trade with heterogeneous firms, where countries can strategically invest in technology. The countries' motive is to improve firms' productivity, leading to a competitive advantage in international trade. We are interested in how trade...

This paper shows that governments have no incentive to introduce non-tariff barriers when they are free to set tariffs but they do when tariffs are determined cooperatively. We then show three results. First, with trade liberalization, there is a progression from using tariffs only to quotas,...

This paper examines Krugman's (1984a) argument that under increasing returns to scale import protection may act as a form of export promotion. We formally prove Krugman's result by explicitly using stability conditions for a multimarket Nash equilibrium. However, if marginal costs were...

Welfare with the maximum-revenue tariff is compared to free-trade welfare under perfect competition in the case of a large country able to affect its terms of trade; under Cournot duopoly with differentiated products; and under Bertrand duopoly with differentiated products. Under perfect...

Economists tend to exalt the virtues of free international trade, while politicians are more skeptical. This paper suggests that this is the case because politicians mainly worry about the income distribution effects of trade liberalization, while economists focus on efficiency. Using textbook...

Even if free trade creates net welfare gains for a country as a whole, the associated distributional implications can undermine the political viability of free trade. We show that trade-related redistribution increases the political viability of free trade in the US. We do so by assessing the...

In this paper, we revisit the empirical evidence on the relationship between trade openness and long-run economic growth over the sample period 1960-2000. In contrast to previous studies focusing mainly on the period 1970-1990, this paper reassesses the openness-growth nexus over a much longer...

Despite the impressive success of trade liberalization, domestic industries continue to find ways to use the power of government to protect themselves from foreign competition. The practice of using domestic environmental or consumer safety regulation as a way to disguise protectionist policy...

There has been a proliferation of preferential trade agreements within the last two decades. This paper analyzes the effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) on external tariffs in small economies where protection decisions are made politically. It extends the Grossman and Helpman (1995) model by...

This study investigates the potential trade flows between countries of South, East and South East Asian region as a result of tariff liberalization using the GTAP-model. The study reveals that tariff liberalization has positive effects on all country groupings of South, East and South East Asian...