The Impact of Optimal Tariffs and Taxes on Agglomeration

This paper extends an economic geography model by tariffs to analyze their impact on welfare and sustainability of agglomerations. Policies with and without cooperation are compared, with the goal of maximizing aggregated welfare in the former and regional welfare in the latter case. The main result is that under cooperation poorer regions are worse off in two respects. In the short-run they loose even more welfare and in the long-run sustainable agglomerations in richer regions get more likely. Thus, although cooperation could generate aggregated welfare gains the potential losers face even in the short-run no incentive to remove tariffs unless they are compensated appropriately, for instance by transfers. In this sense transfers from the rich to the poor are not only a policy to reach the goal of equity but also a necessary precondition to reach aggregated efficiency.optimal tariffs, optimal taxation, policy coordination, economic geography, economic integration, Political Economy, F13, H21, F42, R12, F15,

The Impact of Optimal Tariffs and Taxes on Agglomeration

This paper extends an economic geography model by tariffs to analyze their impact on welfare and sustainability of agglomerations. Policies with and without cooperation are compared, with the goal of maximizing aggregated welfare in the former and regional welfare in the latter case. The main result is that under cooperation poorer regions are worse off in two respects. In the short-run they loose even more welfare and in the long-run sustainable agglomerations in richer regions get more likely. Thus, although cooperation could generate aggregated welfare gains the potential losers face even in the short-run no incentive to remove tariffs unless they are compensated appropriately, for instance by transfers. In this sense transfers from the rich to the poor are not only a policy to reach the goal of equity but also a necessary precondition to reach aggregated efficiency.

Contesting neoliberalism in an ‘activist city’: working towards the urban commons in Berlin

No abstract available

Enhancement of the interface of friction welded steel-aluminium joints

Lightweight multi-material components are of great importance for the transport industry. Not only the component’s weight can be decreased, but also its local properties can be adapted to different loading profiles. Tailored Forming is a novel concept for producing multi-material components. By using a joining process, the creation of a bond between different materials takes place in the first step of the process chain. In the subsequent steps, multi-material workpieces are processed in their joined state while maintaining or improving the joint strength. This study focuses on steel-aluminium joints, which were created by friction welding and further processed by induction heating and impact extrusion. A counter pressure superposition mechanism was implemented in the extrusion tooling to control the stress state during plastic deformation. Flow behaviours of steel and aluminium are largely different at a given temperature, which necessitates a near step-function temperature distribution in the hybrid billet to obtain matching flow stresses. An inductive heating strategy was developed which led to a temperature gradient in the billets before extrusion. Extruded billets were analysed by destructive testing methods and metallography. The bond could be maintained after extrusion when counter pressure superposition was used; but no improvement could be obtained. Without counter force superposition, however, cracks were observed in the joining interface and the joint strength decreased. This paper discusses the aforementioned findings in the current process design and makes suggestions on how the involved processes should be reconfigured to improve the joint strength. © 2020, The Author(s)