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...

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...

A study of distortions to agricultural incentives in 18 developing countries from 1960-84, by Krueger, Schiff, ad Valdés (1988; 1991), found that policies in most of those developing countries were directly or indirectly harming their farmers. Since the mid-1980s, there has been a substantial...

In thinking about policy, academic economists alternate between theoretical models in which governments can design finely-tuned optimal interventions and practical considerations which usually assume the government to be incompetent and hostage to special interests. I argue in this paper that...

A destination-based VAT system without a complete export tax rebate is detrimental to a country's exports, while an increase in the VAT rebate rate helps reduce the negative effects. In this paper, we study the role of VAT rebates in affecting Chinese exports using firm-level panel data for...

We analyze general equilibrium relationships between trade policy and the household distribution of income, decomposing social welfare into real income level and variance components through Gini and Atkinson indexes. We embed these inequality-adjusted social welfare functions in a general...

The phased elimination of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement has been one of the most compelling trade policy reforms of the early twenty-first century, and has brought in significant changes in the industrial structures of the countries of the global south. The textile and clothing industry is the...

Whether gains from trade are equally distributed within countries is the subject of a lively debate. This paper presents a novel framework to analyse the distributional effects of trade policy by linking the OECD’s CGE trade model, METRO, with consumption expenditure data from household budget...