The cost of a global tariff war: A sufficient statistics approach

Ahmad Lashkaripour

Journal of International Economics, 2021, vol. 131, issue C

Abstract: Tariff wars have reemerged as a serious threat to the global economy. Yet measuring the prospective cost of a global tariff war remains computationally prohibitive, unless we restrict attention to a small set of countries and industries. This paper develops a new methodology that measures the cost of a global tariff war in one simple step as a function of observable shares, industry-level trade elasticities, and markup wedges. Applying this methodology to data on 44 countries and 56 industries, I find that (i) the prospective cost of a global tariff war has more-than-doubled over the past fifteen years, with small downstream economies being the most vulnerable. (ii) Meanwhile, due to the rise of global markup distortions, the potential gains from cooperative tariff policies have also elevated to unprecedented levels.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022199620301343
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:inecon:v:131:y:2021:i:c:s0022199620301343

DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2020.103419

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Economics is currently edited by Gourinchas, Pierre-Olivier and Rodríguez-Clare, Andrés

More articles in Journal of International Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().