Law Commons^™

International Trade Issues For The 1990s, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

The open, multilateral trading system, centered on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, is currently at risk. The threat continues to come from familiar directions. But there are new problems too.

The World Trading System: Law And Policy Of International Economic Relations, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

This book serves an important need by providing a clear overview of an increasingly complex subject. The author, a leading figure in international trade law, has distilled his accumulated wisdom into an accessible account of the major features of the world trading system. His intended audience includes not only lawyers, but political scientists, economists, government officials and others as well. While he acknowledges that his own "comparative advantage" is in the legal aspects of the field (p. 6), he places the legal concepts in their political and economic context to write a treatment that will be enlightening to readers from …

The International Trading System, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

The 25th Anniversary of the founding of UNCTAD is an occasion to remember, not for its failures, which it shares inevitably with every international organization that is set up to address complex economic issues that concern developing countries with diverse constraints and objectives, but for its successes, which have been unduly neglected.

Here, I shall recount only three of the many intellectual accomplishments focusing on the early lead that UNCTAD has provided on questions that have attracted academic attention and invited policy redress in national and international fora.

Economic Perspectives On Trade In Professional Services, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

This paper will bring an economist's perspective to bear on three questions raised at this conference by some of the other important contributions:

1. How are services different from goods;
2. What implications do these differences have for the rules we seek to negotiate to free trade in services; and
3. How can we induce the key developing countries, such as Brazil, Egypt and India, which have generally opposed liberalization of trade in services, to support it?

Answers to these questions will naturally bear critically on the narrower question of international trade in professional, and especially legal, services, since recommendations and decisions on …

Revenue Seeking: A Generalization Of The Theory Of Tariffs – A Correction, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, T.N. Srinivasan

Faculty Scholarship

In our paper on "Revenue Seeking: A Generalization of the Theory of Tariffs" (1980), we extended the theory of tariffs to include revenue seeking. We also compared tariffs with quotas, under seeking activities associated with the revenues from the former and with the rents (i.e., license premia) from the latter.

Directly Unproductive, Profit-Seeking (Dup) Activities, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

This paper proposes directly unproductive, profit-seeking (DUP) activities as a general concept that embraces a wide range of recently analyzed economic activities, including the subset of rent-seeking activities considered by Krueger. It then proceeds to provide a syn-thesis and generalization of the welfare-theoretic analysis of such activities by developing a fourfold categorization of cases depending on the levels of distortions before and after the DUP activity. Thus a unification and overview of the subject are achieved.

Foreign Ownership And The Theory Of Trade And Welfare, Richard A. Brecher, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

Some standard topics in the theory of international trade are reconsidered in this paper by distinguishing between national and aggregate income when fixed supplies of foreign inputs are present within the home country. Under conditions that would ensure a national welfare gain if' foreign ownership were absent, international transfer, economic growth, or tariff policy might cause a national welfare loss in the presence of foreign ownership. The techniques developed could be applied to other domestic distinctions (such as those based on race, sex, age, or ethnicity) and to the theory of' customs unions in a three-country world.

Trade In Place Of Migration, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

This is a very useful and welcome study, sponsored by the World Employment Programme of the I.L.O., of the effects that increased trade flows could have on the level of employment in one “receiving country,” West Germany, and two sending countries, “Spain and Turkey,” and their implications for immigration policies.

Revenue Seeking: A Generalization Of The Theory Of Tariffs, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, T.N. Srinivasan

Faculty Scholarship

The theory of commercial policy has recently addressed three phenomena: (i) tariff (quota) seeking or lobbying by potential beneficiaries for the imposition of a tariff (quota), (ii) tariff (quota) evasion, and (iii) rent seeking or lobbying for getting an allocation of the import quota to earn the rents generated. Revenue seeking or lobbying to secure a share in the disposition of the tariff revenues is analyzed here. It is shown that revenue seeking may, even for a small country, result in a reduction in importable output. Furthermore, revenue seeking may be welfare improving. Rent seeking may be welfare improving as …

Contracts, Practice And Law In Trade With China: Some Observations, Stanley B. Lubman

Hong Yen Chang Center for Chinese Legal Studies

Erh Ii gou ("two mile gully") is the street in Peking on which stands the "large import building", the headquarters of the Chinese state trade corporations which purchase machinery, equipment, chemicals and technology from abroad. The punning reference to the protracted length of negotiations there is relevant to this piece, because the writer spent seven weeks between mid-January and mid-April, 1978 participating in negotiations in Peking; the long stay provided an opportunity to test generalizations and to write with some immediacy.

This essay describes the process of negotiating sales of capital goods to the Chinese corporations and the contracts which …

Shadow Prices For Project Selection In The Presence Of Distortions: Effective Rates Of Protection And Domestic Resource Costs, T.N. Srinivasan, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

The paper addresses the problem of deriving shadow prices for use in project evaluation when the existing allocation is characterized by ad valorem trade distortions. The analysis is used to clarify and resolve the long-standing debate among effective-rate-of-protection and domestic resource-cost proponents as to the respective merits of their measures as methods of project evaluation. The derivation of shadow factor prices is then extended to three major factor market imperfections familiar from extensive trade-theoretic analysis.

International Trade And Finance, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Tinbergen must hold a record in the number of Festschriften that have been written for him. His students and colleagues have reprinted his essays, as an interesting variation on the usual form of felicitation; and a volume of essays was presented by Bos in 1969. Now, Willy Sellekaerts has produced three volumes towards the same end! In a world of increasing output and diminishing time to read it, it is doubtful whether this Wicksellian phenomenon of exploding Festschriften for a single scientist should be applauded, regarded with amusement, or deplored! Does not the law of diminishing marginal utility apply …

Trade Between The United States And The People's Republic Of China: Practice, Policy And Law, Stanley B. Lubman

Hong Yen Chang Center for Chinese Legal Studies

The author examines trade with the People's Republic of China, stressing Chinese commercial practice. He analyzes in detail aspects of negotiations, contracts and dispute-settlement which may be important to potential U.S. purchasers and sellers. The Article concludes with a survey of current problems of law and policy in Sino-U.S. trade.

Exchange Control, Liberalization, And Economic Development, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, Anne O. Krueger

Faculty Scholarship

This paper highlights results of the National Bureau of Economic Research's (NBER) research project on exchange control, liberalization and economic development from 1970-1973. Initial adoption of exchange controls was generally an ad hoc response to external events. The optimal resource allocation dictum – that the marginal cost of earning foreign exchange should be equated with the marginal cost of saving foreign exchange – was generally abandoned in favor of saving foreign exchange at all costs. An export-oriented development strategy generally entails relatively greater use of indirect, rather than direct, interventions. There is considerable evidence from the individual country studies that …

International Trade And Economic Expansion, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

The recent literature on the effects of economic expansion on international trade has been concerned with two principal problems: the impact of the expansion on the terms of trade; and the resultant change in the welfare of the trading nations. The solutions offered, however, are not fully satisfactory. Thus H. G. Johnson [5) and W. M. Corden [3], who attempt to tackle the first problem, succeed only in establishing the direction, as distinct from the extent, of the consequential shift in the terms of trade. In so far as the full impact of the expansion on the terms of trade …