We find that prior to World Trade Organization membership, countries set import tariffs 9 percentage points higher on inelastically supplied imports relative to those supplied elastically. The magnitude of this effect is similar to the size of average tariffs in these countries, and market power explains more of the tariff variation than a commonly used political economy variable. Moreover, US trade restrictions not covered by the WTO are significantly higher on goods where the United States has more market power. We find strong evidence that these importers have market power and use it in setting noncooperative trade policy. (JEL F12, F13)

https://www.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/docs/koenig-pamina/optimal_tariff.pdf

Optimal Tariffs and Market Power: The Evidence

This volume studies the role of natural resources in development and economic diversification. It brings together a variety of analytical perspectives, ranging from econometric analyses of economic growth to historical studies of successful development experiences in countries with abundant natural resources. This book addresses two key questions for policy makers in natural resource-rich regions such as Latin America: First, is natural resource wealth an asset or a liability for development and, if potentially the former, how can its contribution be enhanced? And second, can countries rich in natural resources efficiently diversify toward manufacturing or service-sector exports?

Natural Resources, Neither Curse nor Destiny

The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand. Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions on a range of economic issues, he makes the convincing case that noneconomists suffer from four prevailing biases: they underestimate the wisdom of the market mechanism, distrust foreigners, undervalue the benefits of conserving labor, and pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse. Caplan lays out several bold ways to make democratic government work better--for example, urging economic educators to focus on correcting popular misconceptions and recommending that democracies do less and let markets take up the slack. The Myth of the Rational Voter takes an unflinching look at how people who vote under the influence of false beliefs ultimately end up with government that delivers lousy results. With the upcoming presidential election season drawing nearer, this thought-provoking book is sure to spark a long-overdue reappraisal of our elective system.

Introduction to The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

Large numbers of people born in poor countries would like to leave those countries, but barriers prevent their emigration. Those barriers, according to economists best estimates to date, cost the world economy much more than all remaining barriers to the international movement of goods and capital combined. Yet economists spend much more time studying the movement of goods and capital, and when they study migration at all, they focus on the effects of immigration on nonmigrants in destination countries. I ask why this is the case and sketch a four-point research agenda on the effects of emigration. Barriers to emigration deserve a research priority that is commensurate with their likely colossal economic effects.

Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? - Working Paper 264

Acknowledgements Foreword Introduction I BACKGROUND Long-term astrophysical processes Evolution theory and the future of humanity Millenial tendencies in responses to apocalyptic threats Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgement of global risks Observation selection effects and global catastrophic risks Systems-based risk analysis Catastrophes and insurance Public policy towards catastrophe II RISKS FROM NATURE Super-volcanism and other geophysical processes of catastrophic import Hazards from comets and asteroids Influence of Supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, solar flares, and cosmic rays on the terrestrial environment III RISKS FROM UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES Climate change and global risk Plagues and pandemics: past, present, and future Artificial Intelligence as a positive and negative factor in global risk Big troubles, imagined and real IV RISKS FROM HOSTILE ACTS Catastrophe, social collapse, and and human extinction The continuing threat of nuclear war Catastrophic nuclear terrorism: a preventable peril Biotechnology and biosecurity Nanotechnology as global catastrophic risk The totalitarian threat Author's biographies Index

Global Catastrophic Risks

Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade

An era of innovation among historians of American foreign relations is upon us. Gone are the days when, in 1980, Charles S. Maier could claim that social and cultural history had marginalized the state, implicitly relegating the "languishing" field of diplomatic history to the status of "stepchild" to serious historical scholarship.' Grievances against departments that supposedly refuse to hire diplomatic historians or against journals that seemingly shut us out are increasingly rare. The relationship of the field to the profession is no longer characterized by the tired, anecdotal saw of exclusion. Instead, historians of U.S. foreign relations are, in many ways, an advance guard driving the bandwagon of international ization, riding along with those who study mentalites and culture. And that relationship has been reciprocal: while the recent story of U.S. diplomatic history rests on its merger with the majority, the mainstream has also reached out to us. This essay looks at how, over the past two decades, the study of U.S. foreign relations has stood at the intersection of the domestic and international, of theory and empiricism, of security/politics and the cultural turn. Diplomatic history is a clearinghouse of sorts for work on America in the world, and I seek to illustrate how a sample of diplomatic historians approach their field in ways both new and consistent with trends in the profession at large.^ This article will consider three (not mutually exclusive) areas in which reform has enlivened the field: traditional realism's engagement with ideology {mentalites), the embrace of international history, and the study of culture and identity. These reforms have redefined the field in ways that confirm the movement of diplomatic history into the mainstream of the historical profession's interests, and vice versa.

The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field

1. Americanizing Britain's world, 1898-1913 2. Globalization in war and peace, 1914-1920 3. Exporting the American dream, 1921-1929 4. Business busted, diplomacy destroyed, 1929-1939 5. Defending allies, developing frontiers, 1939-1946 6. Containing and consuming, 1947-1957 7. Transforming the world, 1958-1973 8. Enduring the crises, 1973-1986 9. Freedom and free trade, 1986-1995 10. Folding the flag: globalization and the new millennium.

/pdf/globalization-and-the-american-century-17jhkf13u9.pdf

Globalization and the American century

In this era of globalization, it is easy to forget that today's free market values were not always predominant. But as this history of the birth of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) shows, the principles and practices underlying our current international economy once represented contested ground between U.S. policymakers, Congress, and America's closest allies. Drawing on historical and theoretical work in a variety of fields and tapping archives in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Thomas Zeiler weaves a complex story of diplomacy, negotiation, and politics that uncovers the roots of our current economic ideology.

Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of GATT

Drawing from a wide array of previously untapped sources, Thomas Zeiler examines United States foreign trade policy in the 1960s. His study probes the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies as they faced the rise of what was then the six-nation European Economic Community and Japan as trade rivals. Trade policy was influenced by five sources: the international environment, the government, American society, the economy, and individual decisionmakers. These five levels are used to examine the motives, aims, policymaking process, and results of U.S. trade programmes during the Kennedy-Johnson years. The in-depth historical analysis is a way toward understanding the reasons for the nation's policies toward its rivals, and America's subsequent decline in world power and predominance in international trade by the end of the decade.

Thomas W. Zeiler

Papers

Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade

The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field

Globalization and the American century

Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of GATT

American Trade and Power in the 1960s