 Strategic Trade Policy and Vertical Product Differentiation: intra-industry trade between developed and developing countriesMichael Kunin and Kresimir Zigic () CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague Abstract: We analyse the effects of simple strategic trade policy in a duopoly with vertical product differentiation where firms from a developed and less developed country compete in both qualities and prices in the domestic market. The distinction between the developed and developing country firm is captured through the difference in the marginal efficiency in production of quality, where the latter has lower marginal efficiency than the former. We concentrate on the case when the domestic market is in a less developed country and when it possesses the characteristics of a "natural duopoly". That is, the size of the market is such that only two firms can survive in it. We analyse under which conditions welfare maximising trade policy in the form of tariffs can lead to so-called quality reversal, that is, to the situation in which an initially low quality domestic firm will jump up the quality ladder in anticipation of the optimal trade policy. We then contrast our findings with related results concerning quality reversal in the relevant trade literature. Keywords: Vertical differentiation; Optimal tariff; Quality reversal; Natural duopoly. (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cer:papers:wp230 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague Contact information at EDIRC. |
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