Trade restrictiveness indexes and welfare: A structural approach
本文通过结构性估计全球贸易模型，将进口国市场势力和出口国异质性纳入贸易限制指数计算，发现传统方法高估关税效率损失五倍，并低估出口国福利损失。
Abstract Trade restrictiveness indexes (TRIs) have become a staple for practitioners and policy‐makers to summarize international trade barriers. TRIs theoretically found a measure of trade restrictiveness by calculating the uniform tariff that is welfare equivalent to the observed distribution of applied tariffs within a country. Here we incorporate importer market power and exporter heterogeneity into calculations of TRIs and welfare globally. To do so, we structurally estimate a quantitative model of international trade. The structure of the model allows tractable estimation of importer and exporter welfare and TRIs for every country in the world from 1990 to 2007. Canonical estimates, which ignore exporter heterogeneity and importer market power, are shown to overstate efficiency losses from tariffs by a factor of 5 for the average importer. Additionally, by not accounting for importer market power canonical methods fail to measure substantial welfare losses to exporters that are captured by importers through tariffs. These channels are shown to significantly impact the measurement and interpretation of TRIs. To conclude, we employ the methodology to evaluate China's WTO accession and a counterfactual renegotiation of NAFTA.