Law Commons^™

Domestic Distortions, Tariffs, And The Theory Of Optimum Subsidy: Some Further Results, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, V.K. Ramaswami, T.N. Srinivasan

Faculty Scholarship

Bhagwati and Ramaswami (1963) showed that if there is a distortion, the Paretian first-best policy is to intervene with a tax (subsidy) at the point at which the distortion occurs. Hence a domestic tax-cum-subsidy with respect to production would be first-best optimal when there was a domestic distortion (defined as the divergence between domestic prices and the marginal rate of transformation in domestic production) just as a tariff policy would be first-best optimal under monopoly power in trade (which involves a foreign distortion). An important corollary, for the case of a distortionary wage differential, is that while a tax-cum-subsidy policy …

Optimal Policies And Immiserizing Growth, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

In 1958, I analysed the paradoxical case of "immiserizing growth" [2] where a country, with monopoly power in trade, found that the growth-induced deterioration in its terms of trade implied a sufficiently large loss of welfare to outweigh the primary gain from growth. An obvious corollary of this proposition was that, if the country imposed an optimum tariff (either in both the pre-growth and the post-growth situations, or in the latter situation alone), this paradox would be eliminated.

James Melvin, in an interesting note [5], has now produced yet another analysis of immiserizing growth, where demand differences of the factor-intensity-reversals …

Non-Economic Objectives And The Efficiency Properties Of Trade, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

It is well known (Kemp, 1962; Samuelson, 1962; Bhagwati, forthcoming) that, for a country with no monopoly power in trade (or domestic distortions), free trade (in the sense of a policy resulting in the equalization of domestic and foreign prices and hence excluding trade, production and consumption taxes, subsidies, and quantitative restrictions) is the optimal policy. It follows, therefore, that free trade is superior to no trade.

It has also been argued recently (Kemp, 1962), that, even in the case where there is monopoly power in trade, so that both no trade and free trade are suboptimal policies, it is …