Variation In Tariffs Research Articles

Trade Liberalization, Capital Imports, and Wage Inequality in Skill-Scarce Economies: The Role of Capital-(un)Skill Complementarity and Skill-Biased Capital Mobility

We study how the composition of capital imports affects relative demand for skill and the skill premium in a sample of developing economies. Capital imports per se do not affect the skill premium; in contrast, their composition does. While imports of R&D-intensive capital equipment raise the skill premium, imports of less innovative equipment lower it. We estimate that R&D-intensive capital is complementary to skilled workers, whereas less innovative capital equipment is complementary to unskilled labor. which explains the composition effect. This mechanism has substantial explanatory power. Variation in tariffs, freight costs and overall barriers to trade, over time and across types of capital, favors imports of skill-complementary capital over other types. We calculate that reductions in barriers to trade increase inequality substantially in developing countries through the composition channel.

Energy Pricing in Developing Countries

This paper investigates the electric energy tariff in the developing countries on the basis of per unit system analysis. The smallest actual value of a tariff in the sample of countries is considered as the base for the studied system and so, a comparison is done. A tariff map is proposed for the dynamic variation of tariffs in different countries where the map becomes as a texture image. This simplifies comments and conclusions for the tariff traveling within others. The sample of countries is extended to three continents in order to differentiate between different systems of energy tariffs. It contains four groups as: Arab countries in two divisions, Asian group and African countries where different investigations and directions may be applied with. Single-phase and three-phase electric loads have been inserted and analyzed. A normalized fluctuation factor is proposed as an indicator to determine the philosophy of tariff variation in each country relative to others. Both domestic and commercial tariffs are analyzed and a sample of industrial energy price is investigated for specified power demands. It is recommended to use normalized fluctuation factor and tariff map for the evaluation of economic support.

Real-time Optimal Control of Water Distribution Systems

This study attempts to develop a real-time optimal control model for water distribution network. The model aims to minimize operation cost by optimal control of pump system, while satisfying various operational constraints under demand fluctuations and energy tariff variations throughout operation period. The real-time control is realized using SCADA system, by which monitoring data is collected and the obtained control decisions are implemented. Optimal pump scheduling model is developed by combining demand forecasting, hydraulic simulation, and optimization models. Decision variables include pump on/off (binary code of 0/1) schedules for fixed-rate pumps for each time-step over pre-defined operation time horizon. Various operational constraints are applied such as, 1) maintaining system pressure near allowable minimum pressure avoiding excessive pressure to reduce energy consumption and non-revenue water, 2) maintaining tank water level within an appropriate range, and 3) peak energy consumption limit for each pump station. The proposed model follows four steps; step1) demand forecasting, step 2) system update based on SCADA monitoring data, step 3) optimizing pump/valve control decision, and 4) implementing current time control settings.

Institutions, Infrastructure, and Trade

We work with a panel of bilateral trade flows from 1988 to 2002, exploring the influence of infrastructure, institutional quality, colonial and geographic context, and trade preferences on the pattern of bilateral trade. We are interested in threshold effects, and so emphasize those cases where bilateral country pairs do not actually trade. We depart from the institutions and infrastructure literature in this respect, using selection-based gravity modeling of trade flows. We also depart from this literature by mixing principal components (to condense our institutional and infrastructure measures) with a focus on deviations from expected values for given income cohorts to control for multicollinearity. Infrastructure, and institutional quality, are significant determinants not only of export levels, but also of the likelihood exports will take place at all. Our results support the notion that export performance, and the propensity to take part in the trading system at all, depends on institutional quality and access to well developed transport and communications infrastructure. Indeed, this dependence is far more important, empirically, than variations in tariffs in explaining sample variations in North-South trade. This implies that policy emphasis on developing country market access, instead of support for trade facilitation, may be misplaced.

A European comparison of reimbursement in breast reconstruction

AimsCase payment mechanisms have become the principal means of remunerating hospitals in most developed countries. The purpose of this study was to make an international comparison of reimbursement for breast reconstructive surgery. MethodsWe analysed remuneration for unilateral and bilateral female breast reconstruction (pedicled flaps, free flaps, alloplastic procedures) across five different European countries. National grouper software was used to identify Diagnosis Related Groups from which the proceeds were derived. ResultsThe mean reimbursement was € 5593 for pedicled flaps, € 9149 for free flaps and € 4037 for implant-based reconstructions. The highest payments were in Sweden and the lowest in Italy. When adjusting payments by purchasing power parities, the relation among the countries did not change. The Austrian system makes a clear distinction between one-stage and two-stage delayed reconstructive interventions whereas reimbursement in other countries favoured a two-stage approach. Only one of five national reimbursement systems distinguishes between unilateral and bilateral reconstructions. ConclusionsAcross a spectrum of European countries, reimbursement for breast reconstruction was based on similar procedure-specific systems, although there was a wide variation in tariffs and consideration of other factors such as underlying diagnosis. As delivery of healthcare becomes more rationalised, there is a need for individualised reimbursement which correlates directly with activity. Drawing on the experience of different healthcare systems may lead to development of a more robust and fair system of reimbursement.

Applications of transport economics and imperfect competition

The great majority of analyses made in transport economics use, explicitly or, more often, implicitly, the common assumption of perfect competition. This is the case, for instance, when infrastructure projects are evaluated using the mere sum of the surpluses of transport users and providers. Even when putting aside the question of externalities such as noise, safety or environmental quality, the real chain of economic interactions that takes place in transport provision or downstream of transport provision is not taken into account. Surely enough, describing and simulating this chain could be quite complex. Nevertheless, it is not uninteresting to try to estimate if it does make a big difference or not to make this approximation. The paper makes such an attempt for two broad kinds of applications of transport economics: Transport pricingbuilding on a generic formulation of imperfect competition pricing behaviour that encompasses a broad range of competition situations, and taking the railway case as a benchmark, simulation results give an idea of the order of magnitude of optimal tariff variation when perfect competition is assumed as compared to “real” competition situation. These results are completed and somewhat mitigated by observations on the final welfare impact of this discrepancy. Project assessmentthe consequences of imperfect competition situations are analysed, first, for transport provision, discussing the diverse levels of representation of economic interactions that are used in usual project assessment. Second, we use both theoretical and heuristic formulations of the interactions that take place within simple chains of economic actors downstream of transport provision. Besides pure “short sighted” profit maximisation and the base case of perfect competition, the more general imperfect competition modelling mentioned above is completed with simple “surplus sharing” behaviours.As a whole, imperfect competition effects seem to be high within the transport sector and should be treated, both for project assessment and for infrastructure pricing. The case is less clear as regards imperfect competition downstream of transport but still deserves attention. The numerous simulations and the economic analyses performed lead us to give hints for improving some of the current practices of economic assessment concerning infrastructure pricing and project assessment.

Optimal Tariffs and Market Power: The Evidence

We find that prior to World Trade Organization membership, countries set import tariffs 9 percentage points higher on inelastically supplied imports relative to those supplied elastically. The magnitude of this effect is similar to the size of average tariffs in these countries, and market power explains more of the tariff variation than a commonly used political economy variable. Moreover, US trade restrictions not covered by the WTO are significantly higher on goods where the United States has more market power. We find strong evidence that these importers have market power and use it in setting noncooperative trade policy. (JEL F12, F13)

Institutions, Infrastructure and Trade

The authors examine the influence of infrastructure, institutional quality, colonial and geographic context, and trade preferences on the pattern of bilateral trade. They are interested in threshold effects, and so emphasize those cases where bilateral country pairs do not actually trade. The authors depart from the institutions and infrastructure literature in this respect, using selection-based gravity modeling of trade flows. They also depart from this literature by mixing principal components (to condense the institutional and infrastructure measures) with a focus on deviations in the resulting indexes from expected values for given income cohorts to control for multicollinearity. The authors work with a panel of 284,049 bilateral trade flows from 1988 to 2002. Matching bilateral trade and tariff data and controlling for tariff preferences, level of development, and standard distance measures, they find that infrastructure and institutional quality are significant determinants not only of export levels, but also of the likelihood exports will take place at all. Their results support the notion that export performance, and the propensity to take part in the trading system at all, depends on institutional quality and access to well-developed transport and communications infrastructure. Indeed, this dependence is far more important, empirically, than variations in tariffs in explaining sample variations in North-South trade.

Tariff variations - Dr Reid's reply to our question

At the recent NHS Confederation Conference, BJHCM asked Dr John Reid, Secretary of State for Health, a question about the possible unintended consequences of the national tariff for Payment By Results. Not knowing the answer on the spot, Dr Reid promised, and promptly provided, a written response. We feature Dr Reid's reply in full, and consider some of the possible implications.

Trade Restrictiveness Benchmarks

Benchmark measures of trade restrictiveness uising the Trade Restrictiveness Index stand in sharp contrast to standard measures. For a 27 country sample, trade weighted average tariffs underestimate restrictiveness meastured by the 'uniform tariff equivalent' (the inverse of the TRI minus one) by an average of 50%. For a 7 case sample of changes in trade policy, the TRI and changes in average tariffs are uncorrelated. These concltusions appear to be robust with respect to missing data problems and to elasticity of substitution variation, but may be sensitive to the asstumptions uised to treat NTBs. Trade policies are often compared across countries and over time. For this purpose, analysts use such measures as trade-weighted average tariffs and NonTariff Barrier (NTB) coverage ratios, and dispersion measures such as the coefficient of variation of tariffs. All such measures are without theoretical foundation. The problem presented by the lack of theoretically based index numbers of trade policy stands out in two examples. First, the link between openness and growth can't be reliably examined without such indices (Edwards, 1993). Second, the World Bank routinely uses tariff mean and dispersion indices in the evaluation of loan conditionality. Anderson and Neary (1996) develop a theoretically consistent index of trade policy for both tariff and nontariff barriers, the Trade Restrictiveness Index (TRI). It is defined as the uniform price deflator which, applied to the new levels of distorted prices, yields the old level of utility of the representative agent. The inverse of the TRI minus one is equal to the uniform tariff equivalent of the tariff and NTB structure. The TRI provides a unified solution to two apparent defects of the atheoretic measures. First, the usual weights reflect the protected situation, hence are 'too small'. By treating the trade policy index number problem as an ideal price deflator problem, the TRI solves the problem of ideal weights. Second, and more subtly, the ideal weights are not ideal trade weights. The use of dispersion measures of tariffs is presumably motivated by the notion that the dead weight loss triangle due to tariffs (that is, a measure of the welfare cost of tariffs) is proportional to the square of the tariff. There is something right about this idea, as the TRI uses ideal marginal welfare weights. The TRI extends from tariffs only to include both tariffs and quotas and to include the trade restrictiveness impact of domestic measures such as production subsidies (Anderson et al.,

National welfare in an open economy in the presence of foreign-owned factors of production

In the presence of foreign-owned factors of production in the economy, the effect of trade policy changes on national welfare needs to take into account the possible redistributive effect between foreign-owned and domestic factors. Therefore, an otherwise welfare-improving trade liberalization may paradoxically worsen national welfare. This paper analyzes this important, new area of trade theory and establishes the condition under which this paradox of immiserizing trade liberalization arises. The analysis is also applicable to analyzing the effects of external tariff variation in customs unions, with full internal factor mobility, on member countries' welfare.

The Optimum Commodity Tariff and Tariff Rates in Developed and Less Developed Countries

V IRTUALLY every textbook on international trade contains a discussion and/or derivation of the optimum tariff for a country with monopoly power in world trade. Invariably these are treatments of aggregate tariff policy. Little or no work has been done to explain the infra-structure of tariffs within a given country or to explain in what respects tariffs might be expected to be similar across countries. Some papers have explored the impact of tariffs and tariff changes on domestic welfare, labor's share of income and trade prospects for developing countries. Contributions to this literature include Anderson (1972), Balassa (1965, 1967a, 1967b, 1971); Ball (1967); Basevi (1966, 1968); Cohen and Sisler (1971); Kreinen (1961, 1967); Mitchell (1970); Travis (1968) and many others. Yet, none of these studies has offered a well specified analytical framework that would permit a systematic investigation of testable hypotheses concerning the relative protection of industries: within and across countries. Instead, many of these papers have relied upon intuitive but ad hoc explanations of the data they presented. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, we will begin a systematic inquiry into the determinants of tariff policy at the industry level by developing a simple model based upon profit maximizing behavior in section II. Secondly, we will use the derivations of section II, along with data from previous studies by Balassa (1965, 1971) to demonstrate that a number of the ad hoc explanations of tariff data by previous authors are consistent with our simple .model. In addition, we will develop and test new hypotheses based on the analytical developments of section II. For example, we will be able to explain the pyramiding of tariffs in developed and less developed countries, the pattern of the rank correlations between effective protective rates for countries at similar and different levels of economic development, the greater variation in tariffs on primary products than on manufactured goods in developing countries, the greater variation and average value of tariffs on manufactured goods in developing countries and, finally, the relationship between the skill intensity of production and tariff protection in manufacturing in both developed and developing countries. Perhaps, most important of all our results is the fact that, by demonstrating that ad hoc explanations of previous studies are consistent with our explicit formulation of tariff determination at the industry level, we facilitate the development of future advances in this area.