Trade policy barriers are only one element of the overall trade costs. Due to the decrease in the influence of tariff barriers on trade, institutional barriers may be increasing in relative importance. In this line, this paper compares and quantifies the impact that a number of institutional and policy trade barriers have on bilateral trade flows. Results indicate that institutional trade barri...

In this paper we compare and contrast the political viability of bilateral Free Trade Area (FTA) Agreements in the presence of tariffs and quotas. Assuming that the government maximizes a weighted sum of welfare and producer profits, we show that the political viability of FTAs varies according to whether trade restrictions take the form of tariffs or quotas. A key result is that whereas an FTA...

In the presence of a peer-to-peer economy, the option of sharing an item is valuable for consumers. By retaining control over the shareability of its products a monopolist can set a sharing tariff in conjunction with the purchase price of the product, in order to extract state-contingent surplus from consumers: the shareability rent. Using an overlapping-generations model with heterogeneous con...

3. In the fifty years preceding the Doha ministerial conference, there have been eight rounds of negotiations. After the establishment of the GATT in 1948, there were six rounds of tariff-cutting negotiations. This was followed by the first successful attack on non-tariff barriers in the Tokyo Round negotiations, launched in 1973, and in 1993, by the completion of the Uruguay Round, launched in...

Using confidential firm level data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on activities of U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) and their Canadian affiliates, we study the dramatic growth of intra-firm and arms-length U.S.-Canada trade over the 1984-1995 period. We find that the increase in trade occurred almost entirely on the intensive rather than the extensive margin. That is, MNC pare...