The Common External Tariff of a Customs Union : Alternative Approaches

This paper describes alternative approaches to the central question of common external tariffs of a Custom Union. Taking off from the work of Kemp and Wan who showed the existence of a common external tariff of CU that deeps the welfare of non-members unchanged while revising that of the CU as compared to the situation prior to the formation of CU, it characterizes such a tariff structure for two leading benchmark examples as consumption-weighted average of pre-union tariffs and subsidies in the member countries.