Suchergebnisse

The Chicogo Convention, now 50 years old, has become a disaster for air travel (both passengers and airlines), because it raises costs, hindering competition and reducing efficiency.

Reducing tariffs and increasing consumption taxes is a standard IMF advice to countries that want to open up their economy without hurting government finances. Indeed, theoretical analysis of such a tariff-tax reform shows an unambiguous increase in welfare and government revenues. The present paper examines whether the country that implements such a reform ends up opening up its markets to international trade, i.e. whether its market access improves. It is shown that this is not necessarily so. We also show that, comparing to the reform of only tariffs, the tariff-tax reform is a less efficient proposal to follow both as far as it concerns market access and welfare.

This paper is closed access until 1st November 2019. ; We employ a discrete-time parametric duration model on a group of 121 countries over the period 1970-2011 and find that the probability of the end of financial markets' shutdown and re-access falls as these events become longer. We also show that: (i) shutdown episodes are longer when economic prospects are poor and the degree of financial openness falls, the chief executive has been in office for long periods, and the country has a default history; and (ii) spells of re-access tend to be longer when economic growth improves and financial openness increases, there are neither government crises nor government instability, and the country did not default in the past.

We measure the extent to which Swiss market access would be affected in a global trade war. After calculating the change in tariffs at the tariff-line level that Swiss exporters would face in a trade war, we then aggregate them at the industry, destination market, and global level using theoretically well-grounded aggregation methods first introduced by Anderson and Neary (1996). Our results suggest that Swiss market access will be seriously jeopardized in the event of a global trade war, with an increase in tariffs faced by Swiss exporters of 34 percentage points. The largest increases in tariffs would be experienced in large destination markets where Swiss exporters currently benefit from low export barriers (the European Union, the United States and Japan). Chemicals, machinery, professional and scientific equipment, and food experience above average increases in tariff barriers.

The Australian Government's trade policy with Japan since the 1980s has aimed to improve market access in the hope of addressing Australia's dependence on a narrow range of commodity exports. When bilateral negotiations proved almost completely unsuccessful in diversifying or expanding exports, Australia decided to pursue its bilateral goals through multilateral negotiations. This approach was successful in the cases of the beef and rice markets, especially when the weight of the United States was behind the negotiations. When the US attempted to use managed trade to increase its exports of cars and car parts to Japan, Australia supported Japan's protestations and ensured that the US–Japan Framework Agreement was implemented on a MFN basis. Trade diversion still occurred, however, with Japanese buyers being biased towards American goods. While the outcome of Japan's market-opening measures will not become entirely apparent for a number of years, this paper warns that open markets may not necessarily lead to increased Australian exports.

Although SMEs are a major source of growth and job creation, SMEs appear to be under-represented in the international economy relative to their contribution in national and local economies. Two original OECD-APEC surveys investigated how SME policy makers and SMEs perceive the barriers to SME access to international markets. This proceedings presents a report on the results of the surveys, a synthesis of the conference discussions, and the main outcome of the conference: the Athens Action Plan for Removing Barriers to SME Access to International Markets.