Tariffs, Horizontal Regulatory Standards and Protection against Foreign Competitors

Terence Edwards

Global Economy Journal, 2009, vol. 9, issue 2, 27

Abstract: This paper focuses on a regulator's choice between setting a pure, horizontal technical barrier to trade (HTBT) or a tariff in a linear, Cournot duopoly, where a foreign firm competes with a local rival. Where a country is free to impose a tariff, it will not impose a HTBT. Only under a limited set of circumstances will the profit-shifting effect be sufficient to lead to total exclusion of the foreign firm: in other conditions, the country will set a tariff yielding some revenue. By contrast, if tariffs are constrained by international agreement, then the importing country will set an HTBT to exclude the foreign firm if and only if tariffs are reduced below a threshold level. Trade liberalisation agreements which only cover tariffs can reduce, rather than increase global welfare.

Keywords: tariffs; regulatory protectionism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1524-5861.1456 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:glecon:v:9:y:2009:i:2:n:2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/gej/html

DOI: 10.2202/1524-5861.1456

Access Statistics for this article

Global Economy Journal is currently edited by Jannett Highfill

More articles in Global Economy Journal from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().