change, access to foreign markets is also likely to be influenced by a set of international trade policies – such as tariffs, non-tariff measures and services trade restrictions – employed by a country’s trading partners. For example, Porto (2010) predicts that the elimination of trade barriers on exports of agro-manufactures to industrialized countries would cause poverty to decline in Argentina. Similarly, McCaig (2011) analyzes the US-Vietnam free trade agreement to show that provinces in Vietnam that were more exposed to U.S. tariff cuts experienced greater declines in poverty rates.

One aspect that the existing literature has neglected is how domestic trade policies of individual countries, when considered together, affect access of “poor” and “rich” households to foreign markets differentially. This is particularly important in light of evidence of countries implementing trade (and trade-related) policies that favor poor households. For example, relying on data for six Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, Nicita et al. (2014) find that SSA's trade policies have a systematic "pro-poor" bias,<sup>4</sup> that is, trade policies redistribute income from rich to poor households. This is mostly explained by protection granted to agricultural products that are sold by poor households – the positive labor income effect dominates the impact of higher consumption prices and other forces that benefit skilled over unskilled workers. The question is what if all countries apply “pro-poor” trade policies and if the poor are employed in similar kinds of sectors in different countries?

Strategies that use trade protection to assist poor households are unlikely to be effective if one also considers general equilibrium effects.<sup>5</sup> There is the possibility of a “coordination problem” whereby poor households are less able to benefit from globalization because they are excluded from the process. Consider the following. In order to protect producers from low prices of competing products from the rest of the world, countries increase import tariffs and other nontariff barriers on sectors that employ a large proportion of those classified as “poor”. If this is done by a sufficiently large number of countries, which together constitute a “large” country that is a “price-maker” in the world market, the resulting decline in global demand will lower the price of goods and services that the poor produce. As a result, “poor” households will either not be price competitive to export to markets that have implemented measures of protection or will receive a lower price in export markets that have not implemented these measures.

The coordination problem described here about import restrictions mirrors the literature on the coordination of export restrictions and food price volatility (Abbott, 2012; Ivanic and Martin, 2014; Gouel, 2016). Countries frequently use export restrictions to protect poor domestic consumers from high or volatile prices on the world market. However, when countries simultaneously respond to higher international prices for food by unilaterally imposing export restrictions, the international price of the commodity in question will only further increase. Consequently, the “poor” consumers of this food commodity in countries that imposed the export restrictions may be unable to benefit from lower domestic prices.

> 4 The authors analyze how reductions in tariffs and non-tariff barriers affect consumer and producer prices, which in turn affect welfare of the average household in the top and bottom 40% of the income distribution defined by household production, household consumption, labor earnings and government transfers.

> 5 The literature also discusses foregone opportunities driven by dynamic effects. Using protectionist policies to assist the poor may actually harm the poor by limiting productivity increases and structural transformation.

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