Article history: Received 17 September 2011 Received in revised form 30 October 2013 Accepted 31 October 2013 Available online 7 November 2013 This paper examines whether a casino tax is good for local welfare in a tourism economy. We find that what is important for efficiency is not the tax rate itself but the tax incidence on tourists. Casino tourism in Macao engages in price discrimination v...

abstract the purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis first proposed by romer (1993); suggesting that inflation is lower in more open economies. according to this hypothesis, central banks have a lower incentive to engineer surprise inflations in more-open economies because the phillips curve is steeper. furthermore, comparing with other empirical studies, this paper has used the new kof...

Limited empirical work has been done to the diverging current account balances of the individual emerging Asian economies. Based on the intertemporal approach to current account, this paper empirically examines both the long-run and short-run impacts of initial stock of net foreign assets, degree of openness to international trade, real exchange rate and relative income on current account balan...

We examine two important aspects of Australia’s terms of trade using 135 years of annual data up to 2003/04. Since Australia predominantly exports commodities and imports manufactures, the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis suggests that there should be a negative trend in the terms of trade. But the trend is no more than −0.1 per cent per annum, less than the trend decline in world commodity prices re...

I incorporate heterogeneous trade costs into the model of Foellmi, Hepenstrick, and Zweimüller (2013) to analyze another reason for export zeros, additional to arbitrage constraints resulting from per capita income differences. In my model, high trade costs may be responsible for export zeros. The level of tariffs and transportation costs are crucial for patterns of international trade. I find ...

Aiming to explore how the survival of trade flows has evolved over time, we analyze a rich data set of detailed imports to individual EU15 countries from 140 non-EU exporters, covering the period 1962-2006. We find that short duration is a persistent characteristic of trade throughout the extended time period that we study: in general only 40 percent of trade flows survive the first year of ser...

In a two-country Hotelling type duopoly model of price competition, we show that parallel import (PI) policy can act as an instrument of strategic trade policy. The home firm’s profit is higher when it cannot price discriminate internationally if and only if the foreign market is sufficiently bigger than the domestic one. The key mechanism in the model is that the home firm’s incentive to keep ...

This paper studies the patterns of trade and the incentives to innovate in an unequal global economy. We introduce non-homothetic preferences in a general-equilibrium model of endogenous growth and international trade between two countries, and argue that the effects of market integration on the consequent trade patterns and the incentives to innovate depend on the degree of income inequality a...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. This paper examines the spatial dispersion effects of regiona...

Contract Enforcement, Comparative Advantage and Long-Run Growth* The effects of the quality of institutions on economic development and comparative advantage have been so far investigated separately. This paper proposes a theoretical framework in which trade patterns and growth rates are jointly determined by international differences in contract enforcement that affect firms' organizational de...