Author : Wisarut Suwanprasert
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 62 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (13 download)
Book Synopsis Optimal Trade Policy, Equilibrium Unemployment and Labor Market Inefficiency by : Wisarut Suwanprasert
Download or read book Optimal Trade Policy, Equilibrium Unemployment and Labor Market Inefficiency written by Wisarut Suwanprasert and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do politicians advocate trade protections to save domestic jobs when neoclassical trade models suggest that small open economies should implement free trade? The novel insight of this paper is that trade protections can be rationalized as a second-best policy that improves the domestic welfare when the equilibrium unemployment is different from the constrained efficient unemployment. To understand this puzzle, I incorporate a Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides frictional labor market into the standard Heckscher-Ohlin model of International Trade. The model offers four main findings. First, when the relative price of the labor (capital)-intensive good increases, equilibrium unemployment decreases (increases). Second, a labor market in a competitive equilibrium is constrained-efficient when the Hosios condition is satisfied. Third, a capital-abundant country with inefficiently high unemployment can experience welfare losses from trade. Conditional upon having the same observed trade share, a labor-abundant country with inefficiently high unemployment experiences extra welfare gains from international trade. Finally and most importantly, when the labor market in a small open economy generates inefficiently high equilibrium unemployment, the optimal trade policy is an import tariff in a capital-abundant country and an export subsidy in a labor-abundant country. Free trade is optimal only when a labor market is initially efficient. The model's predictions are supported by patterns of tariffs in WTO member countries.