Foreign-Owned Capital and Endogenous Tariffs

Abstract

During the last two decades we simultaneously observed an import a n t increase in investment abroad and a rush towards free-trade worldwide.This paper argues that the former may (partially) help explain the latter.In a model of endogenous determination of trade protection through lobbying, where the government is also concerned by income redistribution among owners of foreign and national factors of production, entry of foreign capital into the host country will most likely reduce the endogenous level of protection.If the elasticity of substitution between labour and capital is sufficiently small, we show that protection cannot increase after the entry of foreign capital, regardless of the form of investment abroad (acquisition of existing domestic firms, or entry by f o r eign firms) or its trade orientation (whether foreign capital enters the e x p o r t-or import-competing sector).(J E L -C l a s s i f i c a t i o n s : F13, F21) <K e y Words: endogenous trade policy, foreign-owned firms.>

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.