Many skeptics of trade liberalization in the developing world argue that lowering trade taxes can cause significant fiscal pressures in countries particularly reliant on these taxes and result in a reallocation of resources away from important development goals. This paper evaluates whether...

What kind of tariff reform is likely to raise welfare in situations where tariff revenue is important?  Uncertainty about specification and risk from imprecise parameter estimates of any particular specification reduce the credibility of simulation estimates.  A promising alternative is to...

This Paper provides a new approach to the evaluation of pre-shipment inspection (PSI) programs as ways of improving tariff-revenue collection and reducing fraud when customs administrations are corrupt. We build a model highlighting the contribution of surveillance firms to the generation of...

Tariffs on imported energy alter production and redistribute income. The present paper examines a small open economy producing two traded goods with capital, labor, and imported energy. A tariff reduces import and domestic factor income but payment to one domestic factor rises. Energy intensive...

Incidence of poverty for Ghana has reduced from about 52% in 1991/92 to 28.5% in 2005/06. This is a remarkable drop in the incidence of poverty, but the current level is still high. Equally high are the levels of the depth and severity of poverty. This means that any policy pursued by the...

What kind of tariff reform is likely to raise welfare in situations where tariff revenue is important? Uncertainty about specification and risk from imprecise parameter estimates of any particular specification reduce the credibility of simulation estimates. A promising alternative is to develop...

This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization in terms of tarif cuts within the Eastern European enlargement on German and Austrian firm productivity. Unique matching of data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that tarif reductions raise parent firm productivity significantly. A ten percentage...

This paper gives a quantitative assessment of possible trade effects resulting from different trade liberalization scenarios within the EU. The simulations are based on the GTAP model, a computable general equilibrium model. We use the GTAP database and own estimates of protection in the service...

Trade reforms in transition economies are analyzed in a model of trade and vertical product differentiation. We first show that trade liberalization in transition economies reduces the local firm s output and raises the prices of all variants. Second, we find that neither free trade nor the...