Distributed electricity producers, such as small wind farms and solar installations, pose several technical and economic challenges in Smart Grid design. One approach to addressing these challenges is through Broker Agentswho buy electricity from distributed producers, and also sell electricity to consumers, via a Tariff Market–a new market mechanism where Broker Agents publish concurrent bid a...

This paper explores the impact on the Southern Mediterranean Countries (SMC) of the current process of trade liberalisation with the European Union. The methodology is that of computable general equilibrium modelling under imperfect competition and the model includes 10 countries and 11 sectors. This allows for both a cross-country and cross-sectoral analysis of the results. The experiments con...

This paper offers an economic assessment of the opportunities and challenges provided by the WTO’s Doha Development Agenda, particularly through agricultural trade liberalization, for low-income countries seeking to trade their way out of poverty. After discussing links between poverty, economic growth and trade, it reports modelling results showing that farm product markets remain the most cos...

Interconnection rates are a key variable in telecommunications markets. Every call that is placed must be terminated by the network of the receiving party, thus the termination end has the characteristic of an economic bottleneck and is subject to regulation in many countries. This paper examines the impact of regulatory intervention to cut termination rates of calls to mobile phones. We argue ...

For the better part of the past century, residential customers in the United States and many other countries have paid for electricity through a twopart tariff that has collected most of the revenue through a flat volumetric charge—that is, flat electricity rates paid in cents per kilowatt hour (¢/ kWh). In contrast, a large share of the cost of producing and delivering electricity does not var...

This paper investigates the effects of input-trade liberalization on firms’ decision to upgrade foreign technology embodied in imported capital goods. We develop a simple theoretical model of endogenous technology adoption, heterogeneous firms and imported inputs. Assuming that imported intermediate goods and high-technology are complementary and the existence of technology adoption fixed costs...

This paper develops a simulation of Korean dairy policy that is tailored to the data, institutions, and policies in South Korea. It compares potential effects of changes in trade and domestic policy to baseline projections to 2015. Beverage milk continues to be supplied from domestic sources, implying imports compete in the manufacture of tradable products. We model manufactured dairy product s...

This paper examines the impact of access to international agro-manufacture markets on poverty in Argentina. Measures of international market access, such as cuts in tariffs and abolition of non-tariff measures, can be approximated by changes in the price of key exportable goods. Estimates from the related literature suggest that expanded market access would cause the international price of Arge...

Previous theoretical contributions on endogenous tariff formation have focused on trade models with homogeneous goods and constant returns to scale. This paper investigates the political equilibrium of trade policy when economic structure is instead characterized by differentiated products and increasing returns to scale and there exists intra-industry trade. The result shows that endogenous ta...

In contrast to prior disaggregated product level studies on tariff evasion which have focused on select country pairs, we develop a model that allows us to consistently estimate average tariff evasion effects on aggregate bilateral trade data. This has two distinct advantages over prior work. We are able to obtain a more general test for average tariff evasion effects across a large number of c...