IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/restud/v69y2002i3p707-727.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Optimum Tariffs and Retaliation Revisited: How Country Size Matters

Author

Listed:
  • Constantinos Syropoulos

Abstract

In his seminal work on tariff retaliation, Johnson (Review of Economic Studies, 21, 1953–1954) showed that a country will “win” a bilateral “tariff war” if its relative monopoly/monopsony power in world trade is sufficiently large. However, it is unclear from Johnson's analysis and from subsequent research on the subject how this power is determined in general economic environments. An important goal of this paper is to address this issue. With the help of a neoclassical trade model in which country size is at centre stage, it is shown that a sufficient condition for a country to prefer a non-cooperative Nash tariff equilibrium (retaliation) over free trade is that its relative size be sufficiently large. The paper also refines the structure of the general trade model and generates additional characterization results on the importance of country size for best-response tariff functions, retaliatory tariffs, and welfare. Copyright 2002, Wiley-Blackwell.

Suggested Citation

  • Constantinos Syropoulos, 2002. "Optimum Tariffs and Retaliation Revisited: How Country Size Matters," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 69(3), pages 707-727.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:69:y:2002:i:3:p:707-727
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/1467-937X.t01-1-00028
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:69:y:2002:i:3:p:707-727. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/restud .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.