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Clea Melenotte - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

Josh Ederington - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • International Coordination of Trade and Domestic Policies
    American Economic Review, 2001
    Co-Authors: Josh Ederington
    Abstract:

    The success of GATT negotiations in lowering tariff barriers worldwide has shifted attention to the use of domestic policies as a secondary trade barrier, raising the question of how to deal with domestic policies within an International trade agreement. Currently, no theoretical basis exists for considering the allocation of scarce enforcement power at the International level over trade and domestic policies within a unified agreement. This paper provides such a framework in a model of self-enforcing International agreements. It is shown that, when limited enforcement power prevents countries from implementing a fully efficient set of trade and domestic policies, tariff barriers are the most efficient means of affording countries protection so as to maintain the viability of the agreement. This result supports current GATT language which allows governments the use of tariffs but prohibits the use of domestic policies as "disguised" trade restrictions.

  • International Coordination of trade and domestic policies
    American Economic Review, 2001
    Co-Authors: Josh Ederington
    Abstract:

    The past half century has seen a dramatic multilateral reduction in tariff barriers under General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations. However, as tariff barriers have fallen, attention has shifted to the use of domestic policies as secondary trade barriers. A primary concern is that, as countries sign trade agreements that constrain their ability to pursue trade goals through trade policy, there will be unilateral incentives for governments to distort their domestic policies as a secondary means of protection.1 Increasingly, International trade disputes revolve around a country's use of internal regulations as a means of restricting trade. The United States has successfully challenged the system of liquor taxes in both Japan and Korea as discriminating against imported liquor, while Venezuela and Brazil have challenged American standards for reformulated and conventional gasoline as trade protection masquerading as environmentalism. GATT contains several articles concerning the International regulation of domestic policies, but the question of how to fully incorporate domestic policies within GATT negotiations (and other International trade agreements) remains contentious. Indeed, at both the Ministerial Meeting in 1994 (at the close of the Uruguay round) and the recent unsuccessful Ministerial Conference in Seattle, many GATT delegates renewed demands for the relationship between trade and various domestic policies (e.g., environmental policy, labor standards, or competition policy) to be examined. Despite the importance that has recently been placed on International cooperation over domestic policies, no theoretical basis exists for considering how to cooperate over both trade and domestic policies within an International agreement. Previous papers on negotiation over two instruments of protection (e.g., Copeland, 1989, 1990; Thomas L. Hungerford, 1991) have assumed asymmetric limitations on cooperation (i.e., they assume that one of the two instruments is either nonobservable or nonnegotiable). This paper extends such work by investigating cooperation over two negotiable instruments of protection under symmetric limitations on cooperation, and provides insight into the design of International trade agreements that incorporate cooperation over domestic policies. I adopt the view that enforcement issues are central to the understanding of International cooperation. One of the challenges of International cooperation is the absence of a central authority to enforce the terms of an agreement. Without access to an external enforcement mechanism, International agreements are viable only as long as member countries view continued cooperation to be in their own self-interest (i.e., the benefits from cooperating outweigh the potential gains from cheating).2 While the GATT/ * Department of Economics, University of Miami, P.O. Box 248126, Coral Gables, FL 33124 (e-mail: ederington@miami.edu). I would like to thank Bob Staiger, Bob Baldwin, Wolfgang Keller, Phillip McCalman, Jenny Minier, seminar participants at the NBER Conference on Trade, the Environment and Natural Resources, and two anonymous referees for comments on earlier versions of this paper. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own. ' For example, Brian R. Copeland (1990) examined negotiation over one trade barrier, leaving a secondary trade barrier (e.g., nontariff barriers, domestic legislation, etc.) to be set noncooperatively. He shows that trade liberalization will induce substitution toward the less efficient, nonnegotiable instrument of protection due to the unilateral incentives to maintain trade protection facing countries. Thus, within a cooperative framework, the two types of barriers serve as imperfect substitutes for each other. 2 As stated by Kenneth W. Dam in his review of the GATT institution: "The best guarantee that a commitment of any kind will be kept (particularly in an International setting where courts are of limited importance and, even more important, marshals and jails are nonexistent) is that the parties continue to view adherence to their agreement in their mutual interest ... Thus, the GATT system, unlike most legal systems ... , is not designed to exclude self-help in the form of retaliation. Rather, retaliation, subjected to established procedures and kept within prescribed bounds, is made the heart of the GATT system" (Dam, 1970 pp. 80-81).

Didier Raoult - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

Christian A. Ruzzier - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • The Case for International Coordination of Electricity Regulation: Evidence from the Measurement of Efficiency in South America
    Journal of Regulatory Economics, 2004
    Co-Authors: Antonio Estache, Martín A. Rossi, Christian A. Ruzzier
    Abstract:

    A decade of experience has shown that monitoring the performance of public and private monopolies is the hardest part of electricity sector reform in South America—because operators control most of the information needed for effective regulation. South American electricity regulators can reduce this information asymmetry by increasing International Coordination and relying on comparative measures of efficiency. To make it possible for them to do so, countries should harmonize their regulatory databases and develop methodologies for making comparisons. This paper uses data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis to estimate the efficiency of South America's main electricity distribution companies. Both approaches allow regulators to use relatively simple tests to check the robustness of their findings, strengthening their positions at regulatory hearings.

  • The Case for International Coordination of Electricity Regulation: Evidence from the Measurement of Efficiency in South America
    Journal of Regulatory Economics, 2004
    Co-Authors: Antonio Estache, Martín A. Rossi, Christian A. Ruzzier
    Abstract:

    A decade of experience has shown that monitoring the performance of public and private monopolies is the hardest part of electricity sector reform in South America-because operators control most of the information needed for effective regulation. South American electricity regulators can reduce this information asymmetry by increasing International Coordination and relying on comparative measures of efficiency. To make it possible for them to do so, countries should harmonize their regulatory databases and develop methodologies for making comparisons. This paper uses data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis to estimate the efficiency of South America's main electricity distribution companies. Both approaches allow regulators to use relatively simple tests to check the robustness of their findings, strengthening their positions at regulatory hearings.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Heather Lancaster - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • International Coordination of solar terrestrial science
    Space Science Reviews, 1995
    Co-Authors: Elden Whipple, Heather Lancaster
    Abstract:

    A broad, International, cooperative effort is under way to study and develop quantitative understanding of the fundamental electrodynamic processes in the solar-terrestrial environment. Japan, Europe, Russia, the United States, and other countries are providing spacecraft to be placed in key regions with the aim of utilizing coordinated, multipoint spaceflight measurements, ground-based observations, and theory to study the global energy budget of geospace. The U.S. contribution began in the late 1970's as the OPEN program (Origin of Plasmas in Earth's Neighborhood) and was reconstituted in the 1980's as the Global Geospace Science (GGS) program. The International effort, known in the U. S. as the International Solar Terrestrial Physics program (ISTP), began with the launch of the Japanese GEOTAIL in 1992, and will continue with the U. S. spacecraft WIND and POLAR in 1994–1995, and the European four-spacecraft Cluster fleet and its Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) in 1995. Russia will launch its Interball set of four spacecraft in 1995. The Inter-Agency Consultative Group (IACG) is promoting the Coordination of the spacecraft observations by means of scientific campaigns aimed at addressing scientific questions that can only be answered by observations from the multiple spacecraft. The Solar Terrestrial Energy Program (STEP) is coordinating the involvement of the broad scientific community and especially the correlative ground observations.