Voluntary Trade Restraints and Economic Welfare

Kotaro Suzumura and Jota Ishikawa

Discussion Paper Series from Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine the welfare implications of voluntary trade restraints in the context of duopoly with product differentiation. It is shown that, irrespective of whether firms compete in quantities or prices, a voluntary export restraint (VER) set at the free trade equilibrium level of foreign exports lowers domestic welfare if and only if it induces the foreign firm to comply voluntarily with the VER. We also examine the welfare implications of a voluntary import expansion (VIE), which is the import side counterpart of a VER. It is shown that the imposition of a VIE is at least as harmful as the imposition of a VER from the point of view of social welfare.

JEL-codes: F12 F13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1993-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:hit:hituec:a272

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hiromichi Miyake ().