The World Trade Organization, which came into existence at the conclusion of the Uruguay Round, is in charge of administering a plethora of new trade rules. The main thrust of the new rules is to reduce or abolish tariffs and quotas on a wide range of products. Some tariffs and quotas were...

Why do governments employ inefficient policies when more efficient ones are available for the same purpose? We address this puzzle in the context of redistribution toward special interest groups (SIGs) by focusing on a set of important policies: tariffs and non-tariff barriers (NTBs). In our...

The Most-Favored Nation (MFN) clause has long been suspected of creating a free rider problem in multilateral trade negotiations. To address this issue, we model multilateral negotiations as a mechanism design problem with voluntary participation. We show that an optimal mechanism induces only...

A search of the accounting, trade and ethics literature failed to find a single article that discussed the role that accountants play in assisting in the data gathering process of a trade investigation. Yet there are serious ethical issues that need to be addressed. Certain aspects of trade...

Electronic coordination may drastically reduce transport costs, especially for digital or digitalizable products where local markets may actually shrink to a point in space. In the present paper we use a model with differentiated products to analyze the impact of declining transport costs on...

What is the appropriate degree of centralization in the context of industrial policy? The basic advantage of centralization results from internalization of external effects. While most of the literature stresses the superior information of regional authorities as a countervailing force, the...

I analyze the welfare implications of protecting intellectual property rights (IPR) in developing countries through its impact on innovation, market structure, and technology transfer. FDI, tariffs, and joint ventures (JV) are introduced to the strategic IPR literature. In a North-South trade...

This model examines the impact of a fairtrade labelling scheme on global and country-specific welfare in a two-stage north-south trade framework. In the first stage (the producer market) two northern processors buy a commodity from a group of small scale agricultural producers in the south...

I study the influence of minimum quality standards in a partial-equilibrium model of vertical product differentiation and trade in which duopolistic firms face quality-dependent costs and compete in quality and price in two segmented markets. Three alternative standard setting arrangements are...

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...