Monopoly Power in Domestic Production, Smuggling, and the Non-Equivalence Between Tariffs and Quotas

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1995
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Lapan, Harvey
Larue, Bruno
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Lapan, Harvey
University Professor Emeritus
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Economics

The Department of Economic Science was founded in 1898 to teach economic theory as a truth of industrial life, and was very much concerned with applying economics to business and industry, particularly agriculture. Between 1910 and 1967 it showed the growing influence of other social studies, such as sociology, history, and political science. Today it encompasses the majors of Agricultural Business (preparing for agricultural finance and management), Business Economics, and Economics (for advanced studies in business or economics or for careers in financing, management, insurance, etc).

History
The Department of Economic Science was founded in 1898 under the Division of Industrial Science (later College of Liberal Arts and Sciences); it became co-directed by the Division of Agriculture in 1919. In 1910 it became the Department of Economics and Political Science. In 1913 it became the Department of Applied Economics and Social Science; in 1924 it became the Department of Economics, History, and Sociology; in 1931 it became the Department of Economics and Sociology. In 1967 it became the Department of Economics, and in 2007 it became co-directed by the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Business.

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1898–present

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  • Department of Economic Science (1898–1910)
  • Department of Economics and Political Science (1910-1913)
  • Department of Applied Economics and Social Science (1913–1924)
  • Department of Economics, History and Sociology (1924–1931)
  • Department of Economics and Sociology (1931–1967)

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Abstract

During the last thirty years, one of the most popular research topics in international trade has been the non-equivalence among policy instruments such as specific and ad valorem import tariffs, voluntary export restraints and import quotas. The non-equivalence principle was shown to hold under revenue/rent seeking behavior (Vousden, 1990), under uncertainty (Young and Anderson, 1982), and in the presence of retaliation (Melvin, 1986; Syropoulos, 1994). Furthermore, it has been shown that different policy instruments have different effects on the stability of world prices (Zwart and Blandford, 1989) in addition to having different effects on the quality/composition of imports (Falvey, 1979; Das and Donnefeld, 1987). Perhaps the best known case of non-equivalence is the one described by Bhagwati (1965, 1969) where domestic production is controlled by a monopolist. For a given volume of imports, an import tariff generates a lower domestic price and less deadweight loss than an import quota. Casual empirical evidence from developing and developed countries alike indicates that highly distorted prices, resulting from trade and domestic taxes, provide consumers and firms the necessary incentives to engage in various types of illegal activities usually referred to as smuggling. In spite of the prevalence oft his by-product of government intervention, it is often ignored for policy analysis purposes. In this paper, we revisit Bhagwati's non-equivalence when domestic production is controlled by a monopolist and allow smuggling activities to t^e place when the differential between the domestic price and the world price is high enough.

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