CHAPTER OVERVIEW
This chapter and the next three focus on international trade policy. Students will have heard various arguments for and against restrictive trade practices in the media. Some of these arguments are sound and some are clearly not grounded in fact. This chapter provides a framework for analyzing the economic effects of trade policies by describing the tools of trade policy and analyzing their effects on consumers and producers in domestic and foreign countries. Case studies discuss actual episodes of restrictive trade practices. An instructor might try to underscore the relevance of these issues by having students scan newspapers and magazines for other timely examples of protectionism at work.
The analysis presented here takes a partial equilibrium view, focusing on demand and supply in one market, rather than the general equilibrium approach followed in previous chapters. Import demand and export supply curves are derived from domestic and foreign demand and supply curves. There are a number of trade policy instruments analyzed in this chapter using these tools. Some of the important instruments of trade policy include specific tariffs, defined as taxes levied as a fixed charge for each unit of a good imported; ad valorem tariffs, levied as a fraction of the value of the imported good; export subsidies, which are payments given to a firm or industry that ships a good abroad; import quotas, which are direct restrictions on the quantity of some good that may be imported; voluntary export restraints, which are quotas on trading that are imposed by the exporting country instead of the importing country; and, local content requirements which are regulations that require that some specified fraction of a good is produced domestically.
The import supply and export demand analysis demonstrates that the imposition of a tariff drives a wedge between prices in domestic and foreign markets, and increases prices in the country imposing the tariff and lowers the price in the other country by less than the amount of the tariff. This contrasts with most textbook presentations which make the small country assumption that the domestic internal price equals the world price times one plus the tariff rate. The actual protection provided by a tariff will not equal the tariff rate if imported intermediate goods are used in the production of the protected good. The proper measurement, the effective rate of protection, is described in the text and calculated for a sample problem.
The analysis of the costs and benefits of trade restrictions require tools of welfare analysis. The text explains the essential tools of consumer and producer surplus. Consumer surplus on each unit sold is defined as the difference between the actual price and the amount that consumers would have been willing to pay for the product. Geometrically, consumer surplus is equal to the area under the
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