Optimal Tariffs With Smuggling

Utilizing a spatial multi-market model for rice in Nigeria that explicitly takes into account the potential for smuggling, in this paper we analyze the welfare implications of alternative rice tariff rates given the government’s goals of spurring domestic production and reducing imports. Because smuggling occurs through the diversion of imports from Lagos, the official port of entry in the south, to the north, our modeling framework also captures the spatial effects of higher tariffs on changes in rural and urban prices, production and consumption, the flow of trade in rice, and welfare across different parts of the country. Results show that tariff rates that exceed about 40 percent introduce some smuggling of rice through the north when smuggling becomes more profitable than importing through official channels in the south. It is also at this tipping point that government tariff revenues are maximized. At higher tariff rates with smuggling, the south experiences greater welfare losses, especially in urban areas.

Studies in International Economics, Volume 1: Illegal Transactions in International Trade: Theory and Measurement embraces the theoretical, empirical, and econometric aspects of international economic analysis. The selection first elaborates on a theoretical analysis of smuggling, an alternative proof of the Bhagwati-Hansen results on smuggling and welfare, and smuggling and trade policy. Discussions focus on optimal tariff and revenue questions, legal trade eliminated by smuggling, legal trade co-existing with smuggling, overinvoicing and underinvoicing of transactions, and smuggling and welfare. The text then examines overinvoicing, underutilization, and distorted industrial growth, fiscal policies, faking of foreign trade declarations, and the balance of payments, and accuracy of economic observations. Topics include statistics of foreign commodity trade, trade tariffs and subsidies, effect on capital complexity, industrial employment and output growth, implications for industrial development, effective exchange rate for capital imports, and foreign-exchange profits of overinvoicing. The manuscript ponders on tariffs and smuggling in Indonesia and the problems of assessing unrecorded trade, including complications in comparing partners' trade accounts, measuring recorded values of all products, market impact of smuggling, and methods for detecting smuggling. The selection is a valuable source of data for researchers interested in international trade.

This text collects the most important contributions to the theory of international trade in recent decades, including the many new approaches developed during the 1980s. Of the 28 chapters in major sections covering general equilibrium, trade pattern theories, imperfect competition and market structure, quotas and VERs, theory of distortions, direct unproductive profit-seeking and rent-seeking activities, customs unions, growth and transfers, and foreign investment, 16 are new to this edition. These new pieces focus on such currently active areas as the treatment of market structure, explored chiefly by economists Avinash Dixit, Jonathan Eaton and Gene M. Grossman, Paul R. Krugman, Elhanan Helpman, James Brander and Barbara Spencer, and imperfect competition and the theory of political economy, with key contributions by Anne 0. Krueger, Jagdish Bhagwati, Ronald Findlay, T. N. Srinivasan, Richard Brecher, Wolfgang Mayer, and several other younger trade theorists. Other new selections take up developments within more traditional topics, such as the classic problem of the effects of transfers, the equivalence of tariffs and quotas, revived in the context of the effect of VERs, and the theory of multinational investments which has been affected by both the new theories of market structure and of political economy.

The United States bans imports of certain agricultural and wildlife goods that can carry pathogens or diseases or whose harvest can threaten wildlife stocks or endanger species. Despite these bans, contraband is regularly uncovered in inspections of cargo containers and in domestic markets. This study characterizes the economic factors affecting agricultural and wildlife smuggling by drawing on inspection and interdiction data from USDA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and existing economic literature. Findings reveal that agricultural and wildlife smuggling primarily include luxury goods, ethnic foods, and specialty goods, such as traditional medicines. Incidents of detected smuggling are disproportionately higher for agricultural goods originating in China and for wildlife goods originating in Mexico. Fragmentary data show that approximately 1 percent of all commercial wildlife shipments to the United States and 0.40 percent of all U.S. wildlife imports by value are refused entry and suspected of being smuggled.

When can a country be said to benefit from free trade? This question has obsessed economists for more than 200 years, and a definitive answer has never been provided. Continuing the influential work begun in The Gains from Trade and the Gains from Aid, (Routledge 1995), Murray Kemp here presents the recent progress he and his co-workers have made in tackling this important question.

This timely Handbook comprehensively explores the complex relationships between trade and economic performance in developing countries, illustrating that it is not trade per se that is important but the context, at the firm, country and regional level, in which trade occurs.

We study the macroeconomic consequences of tariffs. We estimate impulse response functions from local projections using a panel of annual data that spans 151 countries over 1963-2014. We find that tariff increases lead, in the medium term, to economically and statistically significant declines in domestic output and productivity. Tariff increases also result in more unemployment, higher inequality, and real exchange rate appreciation, but only small effects on the trade balance. The effects on output and productivity tend to be magnified when tariffs rise during expansions, for advanced economies, and when tariffs go up, not down. Our results are robust to a large number of perturbations to our methodology, and we complement our analysis with industry-level data.