Domestic Trade and Transportation Costs as Barriers to International Trade.

Available evidence indicates that costs of nontraded services in domestic transportation, wholesaling, and retailing (domestic margins) are higher if a good is shipped in international trade than if it is shipped from domestic producers to domestic consumers. Consequently, domestic margins appear to act as natural barriers to trade in the same manner as international transp ort costs do. This paper presents estimates of the barriers that the domestic margins impose against U.S. imports and shows that they exc eed the barriers imposed by tariffs and international transport costs combined.

The Optimal Taxation of Income From International Investment: A Geometric Analysis

This paper examines how a capital-exporting country should tax foreign investment Income when saving is variable and the goal is to maximize global welfare. Other Recent studies have assumed either that countries cooperate to achieve this goal, or that they act unilaterally to maximize the national benefit. The present paper returns to the framework used by earlier authors, in which the capital-exporting country acts unilaterally and takes foreign tax rates as given. Unlike the previous studies, it is found that if the capital-exporting country's investments do not alter foreign rates of return, the optimal tax structure may involve higher taxes for foreign than for domestic investment income. H21,H87]

Estimating the Welfare Cost of Tariffs: The Roles of Leisure and Domestic Taxes.

In this paper, the authors use an applied general equilibrium model to estimate the welfare cost of a uniform U.S. tariff. The model accounts for the work-leisure distortion imposed by domestic taxes and allows leisure and nontraded goods to be net complements in demand, as is suggested by empirical evidence. Applied trade models generally fail to account for the work-leisure distortion because they omit leisure or domestic taxes and they use utility functions such as Cobb-Douglas, Stone-Geary, or CES that preclude net complementarity in demand. The authors demonstrate that either failing can lead to large errors in the welfare estimates for tariffs. Copyright 1995 by Royal Economic Society.