trade openness tax reform and tax revenue in developing countries this article investigates empirically whether the effect of tax reform involving the progressive replacement of trade tax revenue with domestic tax revenue in developing countries tax revenue performance measured by tax revenue to gdp ratio depends on the degree of trade openness of these countries the analysis has used an unbalanced panel data set of 95 developing countries over the period 1981 2015 and the two system gmm approach results suggest that tax reform is positively and significantly associated with tax revenue performance in developing countries with the magnitude of this positive effect increasing as countries experience a higher development level additionally and more importantly countries that further open up their economies to international trade enjoy a higher positive effect of tax reform on tax revenue than countries that experience a lower degree of trade openness therefore these findings should help dissipate the concerns of policymakers in developing countries that greater openness to international trade would further erode their tax revenue including by lowering their international trade tax revenue in fact the implementation of an appropriate tax reform in the context of greater trade openness would generate higher tax revenue while concurrently allowing countries to reap the well known benefits of international trade

is trade good or bad for the environment sorting out the causality we seek to contribute to the debate over globalization and the environment by asking what is the effect of trade on a country s environment for a given level of gdp we take specific account of the endogeneity of trade using exogenous geographic determinants of trade as instrumental variables we find that trade tends to reduce three measures of air pollution statistical significance is high for concentrations of so2 moderate for no2 and lacking for particulate matter although results for other environmental measures are not as encouraging there is little evidence that trade has a detrimental effect on the environment

multiperiod financial planning a new algorithm for asset allocation is developed the algorithm provides consistent approximations to the optimal savings allocations which are dependent upon personal characteristics such as age and income numerical analysis is used to solve an individual s lifetime consumption investment problem on an annual basis within a context of complete markets and nonmarketable income the investment opportunity set approximates that which was available expost during the 1926 1981 period relative risk aversion in wealth is highest for the elderly lowest for the middle aged less than i of that of the elderly with young adults in the midrange despite the imposition of additive isoelastic utility of consumption moreover the sensitivity of optimal portfolio proportions to changes in the opportunity set is greatest for the middle aged

miracles and debacles in defence of trade openness the central theme of this paper is that sustained rapid growth cannot be achieved without rapid growth in trade a review of the experience during the past four decades offers virtually no examples of countries achieving sustained rapid growth called miracles in this paper without simultaneously experiencing sustained rapid growth in trade in the presence of low or high but declining barriers to trade simultaneously the claim that opening to trade leads to sustained income losses is unfounded a review of the experience of the countries that have faced stagnation or declining per capita incomes on a long term basis called debacles in this paper reveals no connection to a sustained surge in imports

openness and inflation a new assessment romer 1993 uses a barro gordon type model to argue that openness puts a check on the government s incentive to engage in unanticipated inflation because of induced exchange rate depreciation 2 therefore in the absence of precommitment in monetary policy more open economies will tend to have lower inflation rates romer finds that empirically over a large sample of countries and over a broad time frame average inflation rates are lower in smaller more open economies this relationship is significant quantitatively large and robust moreover these findings suggest that models in which the absence of precommitment in monetary policy leads to inefficiently high average levels of inflation are essential to understanding inflation in most of the world this comment suggests that the negative link between inflation and openness romer found may be largely driven by the responses of severely indebted countries sics to the debt crisis of the 1980s figures i and ii show the scatterplots of the logarithms of average inflation and openness for the subperiods 1973 to 1981 predebt crisis and 1982 to 1990 the debt crisis period different groups of countries are separated according to their indebtedness level 3 the solid lines in the figures represent the predicted value of inflation obtained from a regression of openness on inflation for the countries in each group as the scatterplots show there is indeed a strong negative relation between openness and inflation among sics during the debt crisis

a reexamination of the role of income for the trade and environment debate recent work on the relationship between international trade and the environment has found small but negative effects of increased openness on measures of pollution for the average country on a panel of 128 countries it is shown that like previous studies the trade intensity effect is negative and significant for the average country for emissions of four localized pollutants so2 nox co and vocs however trade intensity effects are not uniform across countries of different income levels in fact a strong non monotonicity exists in trade intensity elasticities it is found that countries with relative world incomes less than 0 5 or greater than 2 5 tend to have positive trade intensity elasticities while countries with relative world incomes between 0 5 and 2 5 tend to have negative trade intensity elasticities the results imply that both factor abundance and pollution haven effects may be at work but that the dominance of one effect over the other depends on a country s level of development

marketing information a competitive analysis selling information that is later used in decision making constitutes an increasingly important business in modern economies jensen jensen fred o 1991 information services congram friedman eds the ama handbook of marketing for the service industries chapter 22 ama com new york 423 443 information is sold under a large variety of forms industry reports consulting services database access and or professional opinions given by medical engineering accounting financial and legal professionals among others this paper is the first attempt in marketing to study competition in the rapidly emerging information sector specifically we are interested in answering the following questions 1 is competition fundamentally different when competing firms sell information rather than traditional goods and services and if yes why 2 what are the implications of such differences for decision makers marketers and regulators 3 can we explain some of the observed marketing strategies in the information industry as such the audience of the paper includes academics as well as professionals who are interested in understanding what is specific about competition in information markets familiarity with the practical implications of such differences and understanding of the mechanisms that drive them is essential for those who are faced with the problem of marketing information to answer the above research questions we build a simple game theoretic model that consists of two firms selling information to a population of consumers who are heterogeneous in their willingness to pay for the quality of information the most important features of the model are the following information products sold by the two firms are modeled as random draws from two normal distributions having equal mean the variances of these distributions and their correlatedness constitute the product attribute space which is assumed to be common knowledge consumers are interested in assessing the mean of the distributions and to do so they can buy the sample from any of the firms or they can buy both samples and combine them to obtain a more accurate estimate quality of information is linked to the accuracy of consumers estimate of the mean which in turn is influenced by the accuracy of each sample as well as by their correlatedness consumers utility depends on the quality of information they purchased on their inherent utility for quality taste and on the total price they paid to acquire information knowing consumer preferences firms simultaneously price their information products the main finding of the paper is that information markets face unique competitive structures in particular the qualitative nature of competition changes depending on basic product characteristics while traditional products and services compete either as substitutes or as complements in the relevant product attribute space information may be one or the other depending on its position within the same product attribute space said differently the nature of competition changes qualitatively with a continuous change in basic product attribute levels the intuition behind this finding is the following when purchasing information consumers facing important decisions may find it beneficial to purchase from several information sellers this is more likely to happen when the reliability of information is low and the sources of information are independent under such conditions information products tend to be complements and as a result competition between sellers is relatively mild in the opposite case when information is reliable and or sellers sources are highly correlated consumers are satisfied after consulting a single source in this case information products are substitutes and sellers tend to undercut one another s prices to induce consumers to choose their brand understanding this discontinuity in competitive structures has important implications for decision makers as very different strategies are optimal under different product characteristics under substitution traditional strategies to avoid competition e g differentiation are recommended when the competing products reliability is generally low they are complements firms are better off accommodating competition in fact we find that a firm may benefit from inviting a competitor finally our findings are also important for regulators of information markets as the literature on complementarity suggests price fixing agreements between firms offering complementary products may benefit firms as well as consumers

trade openness and environmental quality international evidence we examine the relationship between trade openness and the environment in a cross country panel using the emission of particulate matter pm10 as the basic indicator of environmental quality the panel cointegration test results show a long run relationship between particulate matter emissions trade openness and economic growth we find that increased trade openness leads to environmental degradation for the global sample however the results differ according to the income of countries trade openness has a benign effect on the environment in high income countries but a harmful effect in middle and low income countries these results are generally robust to different measures of trade openness and environmental quality interestingly and significantly the results are consistent with the popular notion that rich countries dump their pollution on poor countries finally we find evidence of a feedback effect between trade openness and particulate matter emissions for the global sample as well as different income groups of countries

trade with heterogeneous prior beliefs and asymmetric information no trade theorems have shown that new information will not lead to trade when agents share the same prior beliefs this paper explores the structure of no trade theorems with heterogeneous prior beliefs it is shown how different notions of efficiency under asymmetric information ex ante interim ex post are related to agents prior beliefs as well as incentive compatible and public versions of those efficiency concepts these efficiency results are used to characterize necessary and sufficient conditions on agents beliefs for no trade theorems in different trading environments

openness inflation and the phillips curve a puzzle models of open economies with nominal rigidities are often thought to predict a correlation between openness to trade and the slope of the output inflation trade off or phillips curve using a variety of measures of the trade off and a standard measure of openness this paper argues that the direct evidence for a correlation is not strong in turn this calls into question the usual explanation for the negative correlation between openness and inflation that was documented by romer 1993 the paper considers some alternative explanations for the romer evidence

note subjective probability and the theory of games some further comments this note reconsiders some of the issues raised by kadane and larkey and harsanyi and briefly discusses some relevant empirical results

gender differences in pensions the causes of gender differences in pensions are examined for retirees and employees using the 1982 newly entitled beneficiary survey and the 1979 and 1988 may current population surveys for both retirees and the employed population much of the gender gap in coverage is accounted for by gender differences in labor market characteristics while children and marriage have a negative effect on female coverage among retirees even after controlling for labor market characteristics the negative effect is not observed among more recent groups of female employees finally recent convergence of male and female labor market characteristics contributed to a decline in the coverage gap during the 1980s

rational behavior and rational expectations abstract this paper presents a new definition of rational expectations equilibrium in security markets characterized by a rigorous treatment of the decision problem facing each agent a rational expectations equilibrium is one in which it is common knowledge among the agents that all of them are rational and that the price observed is the market clearing price the paper shows that such equilibria always exist and that they need not have the property that for generic economies the equilibrium price reveals all economically relevant information the paper also shows that the new definition generalizes existing definitions of rational expectations equilibrium

incomplete information incentive compatibility and the core abstract we consider an exchange economy in which agents possess private information at the time of engaging in state contingent contracts while communication of private information is permitted the true information state is not verifiable the enforcement of contracts is therefore limited by incentive compatibility constraints we formalize a notion of the core for such an economy our analysis can be viewed as an attempt to incorporate incentive compatibility in the coarse core of r wilson 1978 econometrica46 807 816 or as an attempt to introduce coalitional contracts in the notion of incentive efficiency of b holmstrom and r myerson 1983 econometrica51 1799 1819 while there are some special cases in which the incentive compatible core is non empty our main result shows that is not generally true journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c71 c72 d51

predation reputation and entry deterrence abstract economists often argue that predatory practices are irrational since there exist cheaper or more certain means to gain or maintain a monopoly our gametheoretic equilibrium analysis suggests that if a firm is threatened by several potential entrants then predation may be rational against early entrants even if it is costly when viewed in isolation because it yields a reputation which deters other entrants asymmetric information plays a crucial role in our analysis since it provides the rationale for entrants to base their expectations of the firm s future behavior on its past actions the analysis also suggests methods to treat general reputational phenomena

trade openness foreign direct investment and child labor summary the skeptics of globalization argue that increased trade openness and foreign direct investment induce developing countries to keep labor costs low for example by letting children work this article argues that there are good theoretical reasons why globalization might actually have the opposite effect we test this with various measures of child labor and provide the first analysis of foreign investment in addition to trade we present evidence that countries that are more open to trade and or have a higher stock of foreign direct investment also have a lower incidence of child labor this holds for the labor force participation rate of 10 14 year old children the secondary school nonattendance rate and a count measure of economic sectors with child labor incidence as the dependent variables globalization is associated with less not more child labor

global estimates of pro poor growth summary the main objective of the present paper is to present a cross country analysis of pro poor growth in 80 countries in 237 growth spells during the period 1984 2001 to achieve this objective the paper proposes a new measure of pro poor growth that captures gains and losses of growth rates due to changes in the distribution of consumption the gains imply pro poor growth while the losses imply anti poor growth the statistical test carried out in the paper shows that regional location of countries has a significant association with the pro poorness of growth the paper also attempts to test for the association between growth patterns and certain variables that the literature has identified as significant determinants of growth and inequality out of many variables the paper focuses on four namely inflation the share of agriculture in gdp openness to trade and the rule of law

the environmental consequences of trade evidence from subnational trade flows abstract the debate over the environmental consequences of free trade is not only quite heated but also entails significant policy ramifications recently cross sectional analysis at the country level has made use of exogenous determinants of trade to identify the causal effect of trade on the environment finding moderate evidence of a beneficial impact of expanded trade on environmental quality given the stakes involved we revisit this finding using subnational data on trade flows across us states and several measures of pollution not only does the analysis shed further light on the debate at the international level but also addresses a heretofore unexamined question does greater inter regional commerce at the subnational level harm the environment our findings are striking providing further evidence against a negative environmental impact of trade for the majority of measures analyzed however several sources of heterogeneity arise that are noteworthy

trade reform with quotas partial rent retention and tariffs quotas are the predominant means of protection in developed countries with quota rents commonly shared between exporter and importer this paper derives shadow prices appropriate to evaluating trade reform under these circumstances and provides a number of useful sufficient conditions for welfare improving piecemeal reform in doing so the authors apply the distorted quantity constrained expenditure function and use implicit separability to derive more powerful results than have previously been available

a new measure of trade openness trade openness popularly measured as x m gdp in the hundreds of studies published to date consistently considers the world s biggest trading countries such as the usa the uk japan and germany to be closed economies irrespective of the data set used this study suggests a composite trade share measure that more completely reflects reality by combining two important dimensions of trade openness trade share and the relative importance of a country s trade level to total world trade robustness tests support the new proposed measure in lieu of the conventional measure of openness and suggest that the latter may not only be incomplete but may also overstate the impact of trade on such things as income and the environment

trade liberalization in a multinational dominated industry abstract existing theoretical models in the trade industrial organization literature assume almost exclusively that firms are national enterprises so that there is no international coordination by multinational firms we develop a model in which multinationals compete among themselves but coordinate production pricing and sales decisions across multiple plants and markets free entry and exit is assumed and cases in which the multinationals can and cannot segment markets are considered the model is simulated using data from the north american auto industry results are compared with a counter factual model calibrated to the same data which assumes national ownership of firms

a time frequency analysis of trade openness and co2 emissions in france abstract the paper explores the comovement between trade openness and carbon dioxide co2 emissions in france over the period 1960 2013 by using the wavelet tool the investigation offers detailed information about this interaction for different sub periods of time and frequencies it also reveals the lead lag nexus between variables under cyclical and anti cyclical shocks the main findings reveal no comovement at high frequency between trade openness and gas emissions confirming the neutral hypothesis on short term the co2 emissions positively drive the trade openness at medium frequency hence on medium term the inexistence of strong environmental rules stimulate the international trade especially the exports obtained based on pollutant capacities curiously the trade openness positively runs the gas emissions at low frequency herein on long term the interaction between trade and co2 emissions is driven by the business cycle