Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP13219
Authors: Alessia Campolmi; Harald Fadinger; Chiara Forlati
Abstract: Should trade agreements also constrain domestic policies? We analyze this question from the perspective of models with monopolistic competition, potentially heterogeneous firms, and multiple sectors. We propose a welfare decomposition based on principles from welfare economics to show that, in a broad class of models, welfare changes induced by trade and domestic policies can be exactly decomposed into consumption-efficiency, production-efficiency and terms-of-trade effects. Using this decomposition, we compare trade agreements with different degrees of integration and show how their performance is affected by the interaction between firm heterogeneity and the relative importance of production efficiency versus terms-of-trade effects. We consider several forms of shallow trade agreements, modeled according to GATT-WTO rules, and show that they are not sufficient to achieve the full benefits of globalization that can be obtained with a deep trade agreement coordinating both trade and domestic policies. Moreover, the distortions arising from uncoordinated domestic policies under shallow free trade agreements increase when physical trade costs fall, thus raising the benefits of deep trade integration.
Keywords: heterogeneous firms; trade policy; domestic policy; trade agreements; terms of trade; efficiency; tariffs; subsidies
JEL Codes: F12; F13; F42
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| trade agreements depth (F13) | welfare improvements (I38) |
| shallow trade agreements (F13) | failure to deliver full benefits of globalization (F69) |
| deep trade agreements (F13) | mitigate distortions from uncoordinated domestic policies (F42) |
| lower physical trade costs (F19) | increase benefits of deep trade integration (F15) |
| trade agreements (F13) | constrain domestic policies (F68) |
| terms-of-trade motive (F16) | beggar-thy-neighbor incentive (F52) |