The paper analyzes the potential trade distortion effects of state trading enterprises (STEs) on soybean imports to Korea. Traditionally, STEs have exercised exclusive rights to import the so-called strategic products, to ensure food security, domestic price stabilization, and import mark-ups....

The paper analyzes the potential trade distortion effects of state trading enterprises (STEs) on soybean imports to Korea. Traditionally, STEs have exercised exclusive rights to import the so-called strategic products, to ensure food security, domestic price stabilization, and import mark-ups....

This paper develops an efficiency theory of contingent trade policies. We model the competition for a domestic market between one domestic and one foreign firm as a pricing game under incomplete information about production costs. The cost distributions are asymmetric because the foreign firm...

According to the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture (URAA), all agricultural non-tariff trade barriers should be converted into equivalent tariffs and further, reduced over time. However each member country has the authority to choose the tariff types when it converts NTBs to tariffs such as...

Quotas act as facilitating practices under price competition. Because they relax price competition, they may affect firms' quality choice in very specific ways. We analyze this issue by considering the following stage game: a domestic government chooses an import quota, then a domestic and a...

This paper investigates the policy active importers' incentives and welfare implications of using production and trade polices in a dynamic framework where production decisions occur before consumption decisions. We show that the equilibrium for production taxes and quotas are not equivalent,...

A quota on foreign competition will generally lead to quality-upgrading (downgrading) of the low-quality (high-quality) firm, an increase in average quality, a reduction of quality differentiation, and a reduction of domestic consumer surplus, irrespective of whether the foreign firm produces...

We consider trade policies intended to affect the production of a foreign monopolist that generates negative externalities. We derive the optimal tariff and optimal import quota and examine which policy measure should be used to maximize domestic welfare. We find that if the domestic government...

In a model with cost-based informational asymmetry and trade policy determined endogenously, we show that tariffs and import-quotas have different sensitivities to the signal sent by the private agents to the home government. Specifically, the optimal quota is shown to be more sensitive than the...