Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Publication
    The Impact of Protection on Observed Productivity Distributions
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2017-02) ;
    As is well established, one prediction of the heterogenous firms literature spearheaded by Melitz (2003) is that trade liberalization, by increasing import competition, drives less productive domestic firms from the market. This increases average productivity of the domestic economy via the “selection effect”. In addition, it has the potential to affect the skewness of the observed productivity distribution, i.e. the gap between the productivity of the median firm and average productivity. We examine these predictions empirically using data on 28 sectors across 99 countries. On the whole, we find that higher protection levels lower average productivity and drive a larger wedge between mean and median productivity. This latter suggests that policy decisions based on mean outcomes may arrive at different conclusions than those based on median voters.
      197
  • Publication
    The Infant Industry Argument: Tariffs, NTMs and Innovation
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2017-01) ;
    One rationale for the infant industry argument is that, by protecting domestic firms from foreign competition, this increases rents and investment in innovation and other growth enhancing measures. Using data on 4,750 firms across 13 developing countries, we examine whether protection via tariffs or non-tariff measures (SPS and TBT specifically) increase innovation in either products or processes. We find no such evidence; instead we find a small negative impact of protection, particularly tariffs and TBTs, on innovation.
      526
  • Publication
    Non-Tariff Barriers, Enforcement, and Revenues: The Use of Anti-Dumping as a Revenue Generating Trade Policy
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2017-03) ; ; ; ;
    In contrast to developed countries, developing nations are especially reliant on trade taxes, particularly tariffs, as a source of government revenue. As such, tariff liberalization provides them with an incentive to switch towards other revenue generating trade barriers such as anti-dumping duties. The effectiveness of this is potentially limited due to the greater enforcement challenges with the exporter specific anti-dumping relative to broad-based tariffs. We examine this by estimating the impact of anti-dumping measures for 82 importing countries from 2008-2014. We find that anti-dumping's trade effects are larger for countries with greater policy enforcement, especially in low income countries. Although the results are somewhat sensitive to the measure of enforcement, our overall findings indicate that for countries with weak enforcement, tariff liberalization combined with a shift towards non-tariff barriers like anti-dumping is likely to lower government revenues and hamper their ability to provide the infrastructure and education needed for development.
      317