This paper investigates the optimality of international income transfers in a two-country model in which each country engages in non-cooperative trade policy behaviour. It is shown that unconditional income transfers can never be optimal for the donor country, which not only suffers the loss of...

According to the literature, well known tariff reform rules that are guaranteed to increase welfare will not necessarily increase market access, while rules that are guaranteed to increase market access will not necessarily increase welfare. Such conflict between welfare and market access...

This paper introduces an index of tax optimality that measures the distance of a current tax structure from the optimal tax structure in the presence of public goods. In doing so, we derive a [0, 1] number that reveals immediately how far the current tax configuration is from the optimal one...