DOMINANT STRATEGIC TRADE POLICY

In implementing trade policy measures, governments usually select from a range of instruments including quotas, subsidies (explicit or implicit) and tariffs. In this paper we consider the potential gain of a government pursuing a two-part trade policy: an import license for entry, along with a per-unit tariff on imports. The model is a three-step game between home and foreign countries in the Cournot duopoly. The paper demonstrates that two-part trade policy is dominant.

Strategic trade policy with interlocking cross-ownership

By analysing interlocking cross-ownership, this work reconsiders the inefficiency of activist governments that set subsidies for their exporters (Brander and Spencer, J Int Econ 18:83–100). Making use of a third-market Cournot duopoly model, we show that the implementation of strategic trade policy in the form of a tax (subsidy) when goods are differentiated (complements) is Pareto-superior to free trade within precise ranges of firms’ cross-ownership, richly depending on the degree of product competition. These results challenge the conventional ones in which public intervention (1) is always the provision of a subsidy and (2) always leads to a Pareto-inferior (resp. Pareto-superior) equilibrium when products are substitutes (resp. complements).

Strategic Trade Policy with Unionized Firms: When Activism is the Efficient Choice

This paper revisits the issue (dating back to the Brander and Spencer’s approach, 1985) of the well-known inefficiency of the activist regime where Governments set subsidies for their own exporter firms. It is shown that such policies may be efficient (i.e., national social welfares are higher than under free trade) when firms are unionized under the usual Right-to-Manage arrangement and the product is sufficiently differentiated. That is, the emerging Nash equilibrium regime implies a subsidy policy which is Pareto-efficient, removing the unpleasant Prisoner’s Dilemma structure of the standard Brander and Spencer’s result. As an alternative interpretation this result suggests that, in such cases, it is always convenient the unilateral public intervention because welfares will be superior to those under free trade, also in the case of “retaliation” by the rival Government.

An Analysis of the Structure of Trade Between Australia and China: An Australian Perspective

The structure of exports from Australia to China reveals the dominance of primary products with the structure of imports from this country reflecting the over-reliance on manufacturing goods. This has restrained and led to fluctuations in the balance of trade surplus in Australia thereby leading to lower than otherwise and more volatile output and employment growth. The pattern of trade between Australia and China is representative of trade between Australia and the rest of the world thereby magnifying these adverse effects. Strategic trade policy has the potential to alleviate these negative effects on output and employment growth in Australia.