Managing the Noodle Bowl: The Fragility of East Asian Regionalism

The paper argues that East Asian regionalism is fragile because (i) each nation's industrial competitiveness depends on the smooth functioning of "Factory Asia" - in particular for intraregional trade; (ii) the unilateral tariff-cutting that created Factory Asia is not subject to WTO discipline (bindings); (iii) there is no "top-level management"; to substitute for WTO discipline, to ensure that bilateral trade tensions - tensions that are inevitable in East Asia - do not spill over into region-wide problems due to lack of cooperation and communication. This paper argues that the window of opportunity for East Asian vision was missed; what East Asia needs now is management, not vision. East Asia should launch a "New East Asian Regional Management Effort" with a reinforced ASEAN+3 leading the way. The first priority should be to bind the region's unilateral tariff cuts into the WTO.Asian integration; free trade agreement; best practices; Asian development

The Stolper-Samuelson Theorem Reconsidered: An Example of Ricardian Dynamic Trade Effects

Standard trade theory views the capital stock as an endowment. However, trade policy can affect a country's steady-state capital stock. By ignoring the endogeneity of capital, standard analysis is incomplete and can be misleading. For instance, when capital in endogenous, the Stolper-Samuelson theorem incorrectly predicts the long-run impact of a tariff n factor rewards in a 2-by-2 trade model. Moreover, the output effects of a trade policy can be greatly amplified by its indirect effect on the steady-state capital stock. Since this indirect effect may take a very long time to be fully realized, trade policy can have a long-lasting effect on growth. Ricardo first studied this link between trade and steady-state factor supplies.

The Core-Periphery Model with Forward-Looking Expectations

The 'core-periphery model' is vitiated by its assumption of static expectations. That is, migration (inter-regional or intersectoral) is the key to agglomeration, but migrants base their decision on current wage differences alone--even though migration predictably alters wages and workers are (implicitly) infinitely lived. The assumption was necessary for analytic tractability. The model can have multiple stable equilibria, so allowing forward-looking expectations would have forced consideration of the very difficult perhaps even intractable issues of global stability in non-linear dynamic systems. This paper's main contribution is to present a set of solution techniques partly analytic and partly numerical that allow us to consider forward-looking expectations. These techniques reveal a startling result. If quadratic migration costs are sufficiently high, allowing forward-looking behaviour has no impact on the main results, so static expectations are truly an assumption of convenience. If migration costs are lower, however, forward-looking behaviour creates history-vs-expectations considerations. In this case self-fulfilling prophecy.

Re-Interpreting the Failure of Foreign Exchange Market Efficiency Tests:Small Transaction Costs, Big Hysteresis Bands

Small transaction costs and uncertainty imply that optimal cross-currency interest rate speculation is marked by a first-order hysteresis band. Consequently uncovered interest parity does not hold and market efficiency tests based on it are misspecified. Indeed measured prediction errors are a combination of true prediction errors and a wedge that consists of the "option value" of being in foreign currency and either plus or minus the transaction cost. Due to the nature of this wedge, we should expect measured prediction errors to be serially correlated, correlated with the current forward rate and perhaps have a non-zero mean, if the interest differential itself is serially correlated. The existence of the wedge helps account both for the failure of market efficiency tests and the difficulties in finding an empirically successful model of the risk premium.

Tax reform, delocation and heterogeneous firms: Base widening and rate lowering rule

We model international tax competition allowing for agglomeration forces and heterogeneous firms. This provides a new perspective since a tax schedules have different effects on the international relocation decision of small and large firms (large firms are endogenously more sensitive to tax competition) and these decisions affect industry productivity in addition to the usual effects. The model allows us to study rate-lowering base-widening reforms. We show it is generally possible to design such a reforms that raises revenue without losing firms.Tax reform, Heterogeneous firms, Agglomeration forces

Two Waves of Globalisation: Superficial Similarities, Fundamental Differences

This paper looks at the two waves of globalisation (roughly 1820-1914 and 1960-present) focusing on key economic facts (trade investment, migration, and capital flows, Industrialisation/de-industrialisation convergence/divergence) beliefs and policymaking environments. The two waves are superficial similarities but are fundamentally different. Chief similarities include aggregate trade and capital flow ratios, and the importance of reductions in barriers to international transactions. The fundamental difference lies in the impact that these reductions had on trade in goods versus trade in ideas. Initial conditions constitute another important difference. Before the first wave, all the world was poor and agrarian. When the second wave began, it was sharply divided between rich and poor nations.

Trade Liberalization with Heterogenous Firms

This paper examines the impact of trade liberalization with heterogeneous firms using the Melitz (2003) model. We find a number of novel results and effects including a Stolper-Samuelson like result and several results related to the volume of trade, which are empirically testable. We also find what might be called an anti-variety effect as the result of trade liberalization. This resonates with the often voiced criticism from antiglobalists that globalization leads the world to become more homogenous by eliminating local specialities. Nevertheless, we find that trade liberalization always leads to welfare gains in the model.

Agglomeration, Integration and Tax Harmonization

We show that agglomeration forces can reverse standard international-tax-competition results. Closer integration may result first in a race to the top' and then a race to the bottom, a result that is consistent with recent empirical work showing that the tax gap between rich and poor nations follows a bell-shaped path (Devereux, Griffith and Klemm 2002). Moreover, split-the-difference tax harmonization can make both nations worse off. This may help explain why tax harmonisation which is Pareto improving in the standard model is so difficult in the real world. The key theoretical insight is that agglomeration forces create quasi-rents that can be taxed without inducing delocation. This suggests that the tax game is something subtler than a race to the bottom. Advanced 'core' nations may act like limit-pricing monopolists toward less advanced 'periphery' countries. Since agglomeration rents are a bell-shaped function of the level of integration, the equilibrium tax gap in our tax game is also bell shaped.

Trade and Growth with Heterogeneous Firms

This paper explores the impact of trade on growth when firms are heterogeneous. We find that greater openness produces anti-and pro-growth effects. The Melitz-model selection effects raises the expected cost of introducing a new variety and this tends to slow the rate of new-variety introduction and hence growth. The pro-growth effect stems from the impact that freer trade has on the marginal cost of innovating. The balance of the two effects is ambiguous with the sign depending upon the exact nature of the innovation technology and its connection to international trade in goods and ideas. We consider five special cases (these include the Grossman-Helpman, the Coe- Helpman and Rivera-Batiz-Romer models) two of which suggest that trade harms growth; the others predicting the opposite.trade and endogenous growth, heterogeneous firms, dynamic versus staticefficiency