creator: Anderson, James E.
0-5 of 5
Trade Reform with a Government Budget Constraint
description- – The theory of trade reform typically is based on a passive government budget constraint, in which changes in tariff revenue are costlessly offset by lump sum transfers. This paper offers a general framework for trade reform when the government budget constraint is active, such that tariff revenue cuts must be offset by public good decreases or other tax increases. The trade reform and public finance literatures are integrated to develop some useful and simple new expressions characterizing welfare improving trade reform. The expressions are operational with Computable General Equilibrium models. The theoretical analysis and an application to Korean data in 1963 cast doubt of the desirability of tariff cuts in convex competitive economies with active government budget constraints.
- – WP348
- – 1996-11-01
- – application/pdf
The Welfare Analysis of Fiscal Policy: A Simple Unified Account
description- – A simple general equilibrium model of an economy with distortionary taxes and public goods is used to extend, unify and clean up the welfare analysis of changes in taxation, redistribution and the provision of public goods. We clarify the distinction between compensation and money metric measures of the welfare impact of fiscal changes and show that the equivalent variation measure dominates other measures. We provide an integrated approach to marginal tax and public good changes when public goods have real resource costs and must be financed by distortionary taxation using the concepts of the marginal cost of funds, the fiscal price of public goods and the virtual price of public goods. Here too, the compensation version of these concepts dominates the money metric version.
- – WP316
- – 1996-04-30
- – application/pdf
The Uruguay Round and Welfare in Some Distorted Agricultural Economies
description- – There is widespread concern about the effect of the Uruguay Round policy changes on world agricultural prices and consequently upon the welfare of developing countries. Assessing welfare changes with the standard terms of trade effect calculation can be misleading for distorted economies, since the distortion effect operates in addition or in opposition to the terms of trade effect. This study reveals distortion effects which are many times larger than terms of trade effects in a study of the Uruguay Round's impact on 9 agricultural economies. In 3 of 9 cases, the distortion effect reverses the impact of the terms of trade effect. In 2 other cases the distortion effect raises a trivial terms of trade effect up to around 1% of national income.
- – WP360
- – 1997-01-30
- – application/pdf
The Mercantilist Index of Trade Policy
description- – International trade policies are often compared across countries and over time for a variety of purposes. Analysts use such measures as arithmetic or trade-weighted average tariffs, Non-Tariff Barrier (NTB) coverage ratios and measures of tariff dispersion. All such measures are without theoretical foundation. In this paper we develop and characterise a theoretically-based index number of trade policy which is appropriate to trade negotiations. We characterize an index of trade policy restrictiveness defined as the uniform tariff equivalent which maintains the same volume of trade as a given set of tariffs, quotas, and domestic taxes and subsidies. We relate this volume-equivalent index to the Trade Restrictiveness Index, a welfare-equivalent measure, and relate changes in both indexes to changes in the generalised mean and variance of the tariff schedule. Applications to international cross-section and time-series comparisons of trade policy show that the new index frequently gives a very different picture than do standard indexes.
- – 1998-03-06
- – application/pdf
Trade Reform Diagnostics with Many Households, Quotas, and Tariffs
description- – The desirability of trade reform paired with revenue neutral changes in other distortionary taxes is an empirical question. With a particular Computable General Equilibrium model of an economy, particular reforms can be evaluated, but the robustness of conclusions is suspect; they depend on a particular specification and parameterization of the model economy. This paper provides a diagnostic toolkit which permits sensitivity analysis across model specifications and parameterizations. Novel elements are an emphasis on the concept of compensated Marginal Cost of Funds (MCF), development of the MCF of quotas and analysis of the relationship between aggregate MCF and social welfare.
- – 2000-05-03
- – application/pdf
0-5 of 5