Costly Revenue-Raising and the Case for Favoring Import-Competing Industries

A standard finding in the political economy of trade policy literature is that we should expect export-oriented industries to attract more assistance than import-competing industries. In reality, however, trade policy is heavily biased toward supporting import industries. This paper shows within a standard protection for sale framework, how the costliness of raising revenue via taxation makes trade subsidies less desirable and trade taxes more desirable. The model is then estimated and its predictions tested using U.S. tariff data. An empirical estimate of the costliness of revenue-raising is also obtained.

Global Supervenience on Microphysics

Many philosophers would agree with the claim that the truths reported by the special sciences supervene on the ways the world is at the level of the fundamental particles of physics. At the least this supervenience claim denies independent variability for the truths of the special sciences—but many would add that the ways the world is, microphysically, generate all the special science truths. Call this “Global Supervenience on Microphysics”. What it is for a special science claim to be true, says GSM, just is for the world to be a certain way microphysically. But which way? The popular suggestion is that the microphysical truth-condition for a given special-science statement is whatever microphysical arrangement it is, that renders true the causal import of the special-science statement. I argue that there is no fact of the matter as to which microphysical arrangement this is, and conclude that GSM may be untenable.

Countervailing Duties in the USA

This paper reveals the characteristics of the ITC's decisions on countervailing duties, which have seldom been studied. The empirical evidences based on time series data show that there is a long run equilibrium relationship between affirmative countervailing decisions and macroeconomic variables such as economic growth rates and import penetration ratios. The error correction models show that there is a unidirectional causality from affirmative countervailing decisions to slower economic growth.