Technical barriers (standards), import licenses and tariffs may be deployed as means of limiting the market access of foreign firms. The present paper examines these measures in a setting of monopolistic competition. We find that, if protection focuses predominantly on the number of foreign...

Recent literature has emphasized the importance of transaction costs and infrastructure in explaining trade, access to markets, and regional cooperation under globalization. For most Asian countries, transaction costs are a greater barrier to trade integration than import tariffs. By estimating...

This paper examines the impact of market integration in the presence of a labor union. Effects on wages, employment, product price, firm profits, and union rents are analyzed. Both the theoretical model as well as numerical sim - ulations show the importance of factors such as the product demand...

We consider the impact of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on horizontal foreign direct investment (FDI) coming from parent countries outside the PTA. While easier access to a larger market due to a PTA may justify new FDI, preexisting investments may be rationalized as firms concentrate...

The influence of data aggregation on applied trade theory may not be generally appreciated. Aggregation can have a direct impact on the direction of trade, factor intensity, factor abundance, factor substitution, product differentiation, and intra-industry trade. This paper develops some...

Tariff literature on third-degree price discrimination remains only lightly explored. The purpose of the paper is to investigate whether there exist optimum tariffs in the presence of different demand elasticities. We explore (i) the case of optimum uniform ad valorem tariff, and (ii) the case...

International Transport Services (ITS) play an important role in influencing international trade flows. This paper develops an analytical framework in which ITS costs are endogenously determined. It shows that ITS sector liberalization foster international trade very much the same way tariff...

The paper studies the effects of regional integration on the incentives of mem - bers and non-members to undertake multilateral trade liberalization. Using a three- country political economy model with imperfect competion, it shows how regionalism can undermine support for multilateralism....

This paper analyses the basic labour market inter-dependencies among coun - tries with intra-industrial trade and imper fectly competitive product and labour markets. The paper stresses two major channels through which increased integration may affect product markets and therefore in turn labour...

This paper provides a new model of firm’s location choices. It integrates a Ricardian model of comparative advantage with the location effects deriving from trade costs, increasing returns to scale, product dif ferentiation, and monopolistic competition. In a two-region,...