The Impact of Optimal Tariffs and Taxes on Agglomeration

Matthias Ross

No 26154, Discussion Paper Series from Hamburg Institute of International Economics

Abstract: This paper extends an economic geography model by tariffs to analyze their impact on welfare and sustainability of agglomerations. Policies with and without cooperation are compared, with the goal of maximizing aggregated welfare in the former and regional welfare in the latter case. The main result is that under cooperation poorer regions are worse off in two respects. In the short-run they loose even more welfare and in the long-run sustainable agglomerations in richer regions get more likely. Thus, although cooperation could generate aggregated welfare gains the potential losers face even in the short-run no incentive to remove tariffs unless they are compensated appropriately, for instance by transfers. In this sense transfers from the rich to the poor are not only a policy to reach the goal of equity but also a necessary precondition to reach aggregated efficiency.

Keywords: Political; Economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27
Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/26154/files/dp020212.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:hwwadp:26154

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.26154

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from Hamburg Institute of International Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().