FDI and Global Economic Integration: A Welfare Analysis

This paper investigates the welfare impact on all member countries when nonmember countries invest in a member of an economic region, in which capital is allowed to move freely. It is shown that the nonmember investment will affects the welfare of all members despite that some members do not receive such investment directly. In general, the results depend on the relative magnitude of the tariff revenue effect, the tax revenue effect and the capital returns effect. Specific conditions for welfare change in each member country as well as the criterion for a common external tariff which ensures welfare improvement in all the member countries are derived.

Tariff Revenue and Tariff Caps

We characterize the design of an optimal trade agreement when governments are privately informed about the value of tariff revenue. We show that the problem of designing an optimal trade agreement in this setting can be represented as an optimal delegation problem when a money burning instrument is available. In a specification with quadratic payoffs and a uniform distribution, we find that the tariff cap and the probability of binding overhang are higher when the upper bound of the support distribution is higher and when the support distribution has greater width.

Tariff Evasion and Customs Corruption: Does Pre-Shipment Inspection Help?

This paper provides a new approach to the evaluation of pre-shipment inspection (PSI) programs as ways of improving tariff-revenue collection and reducing fraud when customs administrations are corrupt. We build a model highlighting the contribution of private surveillance firms to the generation of information and describing how incentives for underinvoicing and collusive behaviour between importers and customs are affected by the introduction of PSI. It is shown theoretically that the introduction of PSI has an ambiguous effect on the level of fraud. Empirically, our econometric results suggest that the introduction of PSI services increased underinvoicing in Argentina and Indonesia, and reduced it in the Philippines.

Tariffs and Firm-Level Heterogeneous Fixed Export Costs

This paper presents a two-country intra-industry trade model with bilateral ad valorem tariffs and fixed export costs that are heterogeneous across firms. In this model not all firms will choose to export. We examine the effects of reciprocal changes in the tariff and the fixed export barrier on the number of firms, firm profits, tariff revenue and consumer welfare. We show that both types of trade barriers reduce (increase) the number of exporting (pure domestic) firms. However, the sum of available home and foreign varieties increases for small tariffs. Firm profits are falling in both tariff and fixed export cost barriers. Tariff revenue falls when fixed export costs increase whereas we have a Laffer curve effect for the tariff. Welfare falls when fixed export costs increase and increases for small tariffs and falls for large tariffs, i.e. there exists a welfare maximizing tariff.