A Note on Tariffs and Employment under Flexible Exchange Rates
研究了浮动汇率、要素替代性和工资指数化条件下，关税对小型开放经济总就业的影响，发现其取决于要素密集度及关税对供需两侧的直接效应关系。
In his seminal paper, Mundell (1961) proposed that a tariff leads to a reduction in employment under a flexible exchange rate in the long run. Chan (1978) has recently shown that when a money sector is integrated into Mundell's model, imposition of a tariff generally has negative effects on employment. With respect to Chan's anlaysis, Johansson and Lofgren (1980, 1981) have shown that Chan's result holds under the condition of net substitutes instead of gross substitutes between a nontraded good and an imported good. On the other hand, by adding another mobile factor to Chan's model, Das (1981) has shown that the employment effect of a tariff depends on the factor intensity. All of the above literature assume nominal wage rigidity. But after the 1970s, wage indexation has been observed in industrialized countries, particularly some European countries and the United States, and was introduced into the theoretical literature. The purpose of this note is to investigate the total employment effects of a tariff in a two-sector, two-factor small open economy subject to a flexible exchange rate, factor substitutability and wage indexation. It is shown that the total employment effects of a tariff depend not only on the factor intensity but also on the relationships between the direct effects of a tariff on the supply and demand sides. The model and analysis are presented in Section II and the main results are summarized in Section III.