Rent Destruction and the Political Viability of Free Trade Agreements

Emanuel Ornelas

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2005, vol. 120, issue 4, 1475-1506

Abstract: This paper studies the political viabihty of free trade agreements (FTAs). The key element of the analysis is the "rent destruction" that these arrangements induce: by eliminating intrabloc trade barriers, an FT A lowers the incentives of import-competing industries to lobby for higher external tariffs, thereby inducing a reduction of the rents created in the lobbying process. Using a conventional competitive model, I show that the prospect of rent destruction can critically undermine (and in some cases rule out entirely) the political viability of welfare-reducing FTAs. This result contrasts sharply with findings from the earlier regionalism literature.

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (110)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/003355305775097560 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:qjecon:v:120:y:2005:i:4:p:1475-1506.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().