Earlier economic studies attribute the presence of trade barriers to the fact that protectionist interest groups better articulate their policy demands due to their greater abilities to overcome collective action problems. Contrary to consumer groups, protectionist interests have strong incentive to influence politicians through lobbying and campaign activities since the benefits of protection ...

In the context of overlapping bilateral, regional, and multilateral trade agreements, states face a wide array of options for market opening strategies. This paper examines why states choose to adjudicate some trade disputes in the WTO dispute settlement process while negotiating or ignoring others. It then compares outcomes given the choice among alternative strategies. I argue that government...

It is well known that various forms of non-tariff trade barriers can exist within a country. Empirically, it is difficult to measure these barriers as they can take many forms. This research takes advantage of an export VAT rebate policy reform in China in 2004 as a natural experiment to identify the existence of local trade barriers and study the impact on export activities and resource misall...

We analyze the impact of trade liberalization and removal of the federal tax credit in the United States on ethanol markets using a multimarket international ethanol model. We find that U.S. trade barriers have been effective in protecting the ethanol industry. Under current policy, there is separability of the U.S. ethanol market from world markets. With trade liberalization, the ethanol marke...

Synergies and conflicts between climate change mitigation measures and trade policy and rules may result from: (a) competitiveness losses and/or gains, (b) potential discriminatory aspects of climate change measures which breach the fundamentals of WTO rules, (c) the creation of new types of trade barriers, but also of trade opportunities, and (d) the context in which climate change and trade p...

One of the most widely accepted principles of economics is the existence of gains from trade for every nation under certain conditions including perfect competition. In the last twenty years, trade economists have revolutionized the field by firmly establishing the possibility of modeling imperfectly competitive international markets. Despite this development, most still agree there are good re...

The price-wedge method yields a tariff-equivalent estimate of technical barriers to trade (TBT). An extension of this method accounts for imperfect substitution between domestic and imported goods and incorporates recent findings on trade costs. We explore the sensitivity of this revamped tariff equivalent estimate to its determinants (substitution elasticity, preference for home good, trade co...

More generally, globalization of trade in goods, services, and assets continues to move forward at an impressive pace, despite some indications of increased resistance to that process and the evident difficulties in completing the Doha Round. The volume of trade relative to world gross domestic product has been rising for decades, largely because of decreasing transportation costs and lowered t...

The 21”’ century continues a trend of rapid growth in both international trade of forest products and a concern for forests. These two trends are connected. Forces causing trade growth are linked to the loss of native forest resources in some countries and the accumulation of nonnative forest resources in other countries. Factors increasing trade include relaxation of trade barriers, income gro...