This paper posits a formal political economy model where the principle of reciprocity in multilateral trade talks results in the gradual elimination of tariffs. Reciprocity trade talks turn each nation’s exporters into anti-protectionists at home; they lower foreign tariffs by convincing their...

We investigate whether a welfare-maximizing government ought to pursue a programme of strategic trade intervention or instead commit itself to free trade when, in the former case, domestic firms will have an opportunity to manipulate the government’s choice of the level of intervention....

Government policies designed to give domestic exporters a strategic advantage in world markets are completely effective only if the government can commit to those policies for as long as they affect firms' decisions. Export subsidies or other output policies that affect firms only in the current...

This paper develops and characterizes an index of trade policy restrictiveness defined as the uniform tariff equivalent which maintains the same volume of trade as a given set of tariffs, quotas, and domestic taxes and subsidies. We relate this volume-equivalent index to the Trade...

In seeking to explain why poor countries tend to choose policies that tax agriculture relative to manufacturing while rich countries do the opposite, archetypical parameters for a poor agrarian economy and a rich industrial one are inserted in a computable general equilibrium model to simulate...

This paper is concerned with comparing adversarial with co-operative industrial and trade policies in a dynamic oligopoly game in which a home and foreign firm compete in R&D and output and, because of spillovers, each firm benefits from the other's R&D. Because the government cannot commit to...

This paper examines optimal trade policy in a two-period oligopoly model, with a home and a foreign firm choosing capital and output. Demand uncertainty, resolved in period two, gives rise to a trade-off between strategic commitment and flexibility in the firms’ investment decisions. When the...

Different market settings are considered in a free trade environment, where firms can choose technology, quality, and price of quantity. The shape of competition in prices requires the intervention of governments, via a common antidumping policy, to make firms converge on the simultaneous...

The Kyoto Protocol is seen by many as a step forward in reaching the UNFCCC goals of slowing emissions of greenhouse gases. In this paper we argue that the issue of regime sustainability in developing the Kyoto approach to climate change has received too little attention. We question the...

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War economic relations between Britain and the Commonwealth were very close, and the Empire was of greater economic importance to Britain than at any previous time. International economic conditions were dominated by the dollar shortage, and...