Realization of comparative advantage (David Ricardo) raises issues of income distribution that emerge when specialization gains are achieved. While the Stolper-Samuelson theorem ‘predicts’ that because of trade liberalization in ‘rich countries’ like Austria or Germany wages may fall and real incomes of capital owners might increase, some doubts are raised whether continuous cuts in relative wa...

Trade liberalization episodes are usually analyzed in a horizontal dimension, that is, the movement of resources across sectors due to relative price changes. This perspective underestimates an element present in many liberalization processes: the opening access of foreign ...rms to produce and sell locally. As long there exist productivity di¤erences between native and foreign ...rms and depen...

We analyze the effects of free trade on environmental policies in a strategic setting with transboundary pollution. Trade liberalization can result in a race to the bottom in environmental outcomes, making both countries worse off. With command and control policies (quotas), there is no race to the bottom. However, with internationally tradable permits, unless pollution is a pure global public ...

This paper analyzes the dynamics of trade policy reform under democracy. In an overlapping generations model, heterogeneous agents may acquire skills when young, thereby determining the skill composition of their cohort. Current and anticipated trade policies influence education decisions, and thus the identity of the median voter. We show that there may exist two political steady states: one p...

The link between trade liberalization and poverty reduction has played a crucial role on economic policy in developing and least developed countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Academic research shows a remarkable lack of consensus and no clear effects in the direction of these linkages. This study presents an overview of the impact of trade liberalization on poverty in Sub-Saharan Afr...

This article examines the effect of overlapping institutions in trade policy, where the World Trade Organization, preferential trade agreements, and other economic negotiation venues give states many options for negotiating rules and settling disputes. This article argues that overlapping institutions influence trade politics at three stages: selection of venue, negotiation of liberalization co...

This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization on technology adoption and its e ect on wage inequalities. We develop a trade model with heterogeneous rms introducing a xed technology cost and di erent types of skilled labor. The contribution of this paper is to develop a possible explanation to the increase in the skill premium in developping countries. The traditional framework, H-O-S, ...

This paper seeks to examine economic effects of Brazil’s trade policy liberalization in the early-1990s. The effects in Brazil, along with those of many other countries pursuing similar reforms, have been contentious. The period in question was one of macroeconomic turmoil followed by successful stabilization, and various policies were pursued sometimes simultaneously, rendering it analytically...

In this paper, we present one of the first direct microeconometric studies of the impact of trade protection on household income in Ghana. Tariff measures at the two-digit ISIC level are matched to Ghanaian household survey data for 1991/92 and 1998/99 to represent the tariff for the industry in which the household head is employed. We examine the possibility that the effect of protection on in...