Trade Agreements and the Nature of Price Determination
Trade Agreements and the Nature of Price Determination
复制标题
贸易协定和价格决定的性质
DOI：
10.1257/aer.102.3.470
复制
发表时间：
2012
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
R. Staiger
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Pol Antràs;R. Staiger
贸易协定的贸易条件理论认为，政府被贸易协定所吸引，将其作为摆脱贸易条件驱动的囚徒困境的一种手段（参见 Bagwell 和 Staiger，1999）。贸易条件理论最引人注目的预测之一是关于贸易协定中境内政策措施的处理。根据这一预测，在各国在没有贸易协定的情况下开始的非合作纳什均衡中，关税被设定为低效的高水平，但边境政策被设定在有效的水平。因此，即使在复杂的政策环境下，贸易协定成员国政府也无需直接就其境内政策水平进行谈判。相反，根据贸易条件理论，贸易协定要解决的根本问题是防止贸易条件操纵，从而降低关税并提高贸易量，同时又不因谈判的关税限制而对国内税收/补贴和监管政策的单边选择造成扭曲（见Bagwell和Staiger，2001）。重要的是，这一结果适用于各种政府偏好，并且也被证明适用于不完全竞争环境。因此，贸易协定的贸易条件理论为“浅层”一体化提供了强有力的支持，作为解决没有贸易协定时可能出现的政策低效问题的最直接手段。简而言之，根据贸易条件理论，仅就关税进行谈判，再加上有效的“市场准入保护规则”，可以阻止政府
The terms-of-trade theory of trade agreements holds that governments are attracted to trade agreements as a means of escape from a terms-of-trade–driven prisoner’s dilemma (see Bagwell and Staiger 1999). One of the termsof-trade theory’s most striking predictions is about the treatment of behind-the-border policy measures in trade agreements. According to this prediction, in the noncooperative Nash equilibrium from which countries would begin in the absence of a trade agreement, tariffs are set inefficiently high but behind-the-border policies are set at efficient levels. Hence, even in the context of a complex policy environment there is no need for member governments of a trade agreement to negotiate directly over the levels of their behind-the-border policies. Rather, according to the terms-of-trade theory, the fundamental problem for a trade agreement to solve is to prevent terms-of-trade manipulation and to thereby reduce tariffs and raise trade volumes, without introducing distortions into the unilateral choices of domestic tax/subsidy and regulatory policies as a result of the negotiated constraints on tariffs (see Bagwell and Staiger 2001). Importantly, this result holds for a wide variety of government preferences and has also been shown to hold in imperfectly competitive environments. The terms-of-trade theory of trade agreements therefore provides strong support for “shallow” integration as the most direct means to solve the policy inefficiencies that would arise absent a trade agreement. Simply put, according to the terms-of-trade theory, negotiations over tariffs alone, coupled with an effective “market access preservation rule” that prevents governments