Chile is currently evaluating a wide range of possible trade policies. Using a global computable general equilibrium model, the authors examine a range of trade policy and complementary tax policy options for Chile. They focus on Chile's principal preferential trade policy options: a free-trade...

Starting in the late 1980s, policy makers and academics began increasingly to call for the development of multilateral discipline on anticompetitive practices. Some believe that falling trade barriers must be complemented by antitrust measures to ensure that foreign competition materializes;...

The author presents a tariff index that uses constant-elasticity-of-substitution aggregators of tariff line data to calculate how preferential tariff reductions affect both prices and average tariff rates. A simple general-equilibrium model with sector-specific factors of production can be...

In a closed economy, a commodity tax drives a wedge between the producer price and the consumer price. In open economies, intercountry differences in commodity taxation can induce two additional distortions: (1) Cross-country differences in consumer marginal rates of substitution (which result...

A recent (but rapidly growing) literature has focused on how uncertainty and instability affect the adoption of fixed investment projects. That literature shows that if fixed investment projects are costly or impossible to reverse, uncertainty can become a powerful deterrent to investment. The...

In the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, trade among the new independent states collapsed. To help reestablish interstate trade, the 12 members of the Commonwealth of independent States (CIS) established a Free Trade Area. More recently, four members of the CIS -Belarus, Kazakstan,...

As traditional barriers to trade have fallen, standards, technical regulations, and procedures for assessing conformity have become increasingly important as nontariff barriers to trade. But relatively little is known about the extent and nature of those barriers and even less about their...

The author examines whether trade liberalization should create a greater incentive for countries to invest in transportation infrastructure. He pays special attention to the case of preferential trade liberalization between neighboring countries, where investments in roads or railroads are...

Recently, interest in regionalism has mushroomed, and economists have analyzed it not only from the viewpoint of trade but that of foreign investment, macroeconomics, and political economy. But questions of technological regionalism -whether the accumulation and diffusion of technology has a...

Standard theory says that a country's welfare is unaffected by being excluded from a small regional trade agreement. But for most products,"small"countries and regional trade agreements do have some measure of market power. Such market power can arise if (1) supply is geographically concentrated;...