In models of economic geography, plant-level scale economies and trade costs create incentives for spatial agglomeration of production into a manufacturing core and agricultural periphery, creating regional income differentials. We examine tax competition between national governments to influence the location of manufacturing activity. Labour is imperfectly mobile and governments impose redistributive taxes. Regional integration is modeled as either increased labour mobility or lower trade costs. We show that either type of integration may result in a decrease in the intensity of tax competition, and thus higher equilibrium taxes. Moreover, economic integration must increase taxes when the forces of agglomeration are the strongest.

International trade agreements are an important element of the world economic system, but questions remain as to their purpose. The terms-of-trade hypothesis posits that countries use tariffs in part to improve their terms of trade and that trade agreements cause them to internalize the costs that such terms-of-trade shifts impose on other countries. This article investigates whether the most-favored-nation (MFN) tariffs set by World Trade Organization (WTO) members in the Uruguay Round are consistent with the terms-of-trade hypothesis. We present a model of multilateral trade negotiations featuring endogenous participation that leads the resulting tariff schedules to display terms-of-trade effects. Specifically, the model predicts that the level of the importer’s tariff resulting from negotiations should be negatively related to the product of two terms: exporter concentration, as measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (sum of squared export shares), and the importer’s market power, as measured by the inverse elasticity of export supply, on a product-by-product basis. We test this hypothesis using data on tariffs, trade, and production across more than 30 WTO countries and find strong support. We estimate that the internalization of terms of trade effects through WTO negotiations has lowered the average tariff of these countries by 22% to 27% compared to its noncooperative level.

How effective are "smart" sanctions in imposing costs on an adversary? We consider this question in a model where a targeted regime may choose to "shield" strategically important firms from harm. Using detailed firm and individual data, we estimate the impact on firm performance from smart sanctions deployed by the U.S. and EU against Russia beginning in 2014. We find significant losses in operating revenue, asset values, and employees for sanctioned firms relative to their non-sanctioned peers, which are greater in sectors dependent upon Western service inputs. Strategic firms systemically outperform non-strategic firms under sanctions, implying a cost of shielding to the regime that adds substantially to the total cost of sanctions.

We examine the consequences of increased economic integration between nations within a region. We adopt Krugman's economic-geography model in which demand linkages can generate agglomeration of manufacturing activity. Manufacturing labour is assumed to be imperfectly mobile between countries. This constrains the forces of agglomeration within the region and suggests that the model may be applicable to Europe. We show that trade liberalisation may lead initially to partial agglomeration, then a re-industrialisation of the periphery. This argues in favour of a sequential approach to integration, with trade barriers being eliminated prior to a reduction in impediments to factor mobility.

The global economic effects of eliminating certain significant categories of nontariff measures (NTMs) are estimated in a CGE context. As a first step, a database of institutional information identifying alleged instances of NTMs for particular products and countries is constructed based on WTO, U.S. Government, and EU sources, and compared with the UNCTAD policy inventory. This database is then concorded to a GTAP-feasible multiregion, multisector aggregation. Retail price data from the EIU CityData database, similarly concorded, are analyzed econometrically, taking into account systematic deviations from purchasing-power parity, to determine whether and to what extent the presence of alleged NTMs is associated with significantly higher prices. The estimated price effects are then used to calibrate a CGE simulation in order to obtain simulation estimates of trade and welfare effects of their removal, which can be disaggregated. Removal of the categories of NTMs under consideration yields global gains on the order of $90 billion. These gains arise notably from liberalization by Japan and the European Union by region, and from liberalization of apparel and machinery/equipment by sector.