OVER the past decade, the post-war United States position in favor of free trade has been strongly attacked by those who have invested in and are employed in industries facing significant competition from imports. Since factors of production are temporarily tied to a particular industry, all factors in contracting industries experience economic losses of a short-run nature. This paper considers to what extent these short-term losses alter the welfare evaluation of free trade policies. A second intent, based on the analytical framework developed to resolve the first point, is to determine when a tariff reduction may be preferable to tariff removal and how such tariff reductions may be effectively carried out over time. In the literature of trade policy, it has been shown that in a two-good general equilibrium model under the assumption that factors of production are immobile, the gains from free trade will be reduced but remain positive if no distortions exist (Haberler, 1950; Johnson, 1965). More recently, studies have focused on the short-run distributional effects of changing international prices. Capital has been postulated to be immobile between the two industries and relative factor prices perfectly flexible (Mayer, 1974; Mussa, 1974). In this paper the analysis is based upon the situation where factor-price rigidities exist in addition to factor immobility. Under these circumstances changes in international prices result in unemployment. The economy is moved inside its long-run production possibilities frontier, and any welfare assessment of a free trade policy must allow for the second-best effect of this factor-market distortion. Because the short-run effect may be negative, the question arises whether the long-run welfare gain for a small country offsets this loss.' This study treats imports and domestic competing goods as imperfect substitutes, and allows for the effects of short-run output price rigidities. Limitations of the analysis are that only unilateral tariff reductions are dealt with empirically, and terms-of-trade effects are ignored.2 The model is used to evaluate the welfare cost of current tariff barriers for five disaggregated industries: industrial chemicals, iron and steel, machine tools, electrical machinery, and motor vehicles. One issue that falls out of this approach is whether an intermediate position between free trade and the current level of restrictions is preferable, given the existence of factor-market distortions. It is shown empirically that complete tariff removal generally will not be optimal in terms of economic efficiency and that phased reductions of tariffs over time will be preferable to a single tariff cut. Section I is concerned with the determination of benefits and social costs from tariff removal. Since United States trade policy often is determined in the context of unilateral policy changes affecting a single disaggregated industry, the empirical calculations presented in

Three interrelated aspects of U.S. multinational corporation activity are analyzed here: the ability to shift profits from high-tax countries to low-tax countries; the impact of host country taxes and tariffs on the distribution of real capital; and the influence of these policies on international trade patterns of the United States and host countries. The cross-sectional empirical analysis indicates that the observed pattern of reported profits in high and low-tax countries is consistent with income shifting behavior and that real investment responds to host country effective tax rates and tariffs. The United States appears both to import more from and export more to low-tax countries where MNC investment is greater, but this bilateral focus must be amplified to consider multilateral effects if trade benefits are to be projected.

John Mutti, Bernard Yeung, Section 337 and the Protection of Intellectual Property in the United States: The Complainants and the Impact, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Aug., 1996), pp. 510-520

William Morgan, John Mutti, Mark Partridge, A Regional General Equilibrium Model of the United States: Tax Effects on Factor Movements and Regional Production, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Nov., 1989), pp. 626-635