How do multinational enterprises (MNEs) affect the host country through their vertical industrial linkages when large natural disasters occur? To answer this question, we develop a simple theoretical framework and show that, as trade costs decline, the host country is first dominated by MNEs and then later by local firms. Thus, when natural disasters seriously damage capital, the industrial configurations in the host country switch from domination by MNEs to domination by local firms. The replacement of MNEs with local firms can raise the welfare of the host country.
Agglomeration tendencies of industrial firms significantly affect the nature of tax competition. This paper analyzes tax competition between two countries over an infinite time horizon in an economy with trade costs and internationally mobile industrial firms. Most of the previous studies on tax competition in the 'new economic geography' framework employ static models. In this study, two governments dynamically compete with each other to attract firms through their choices of taxes and subsidies. It is shown that the commitment of the governments to their policies is crucial in determining the distribution of firms in the long run. Specifically, if governments find each others' tax policies credible, then one country will attract all the firms when trade costs are low enough to make agglomeration forces dominant.If policies are not credible, both countries may attract an equal share of firms even when trade costs are low, as the lack of commitment by governments acts as a dispersion force.
Do low corporate taxes always favor multinational production over economic integration? We propose a two-country model in which multinationals choose the locations of production plants and foreign distribution affiliates and shift profits between them through transfer prices. With high trade costs, plants are concentrated in the low-tax country; surprisingly, this pattern reverses with low trade costs. Indeed, economic integration has a nonmonotonic impact: Falling trade costs first decrease and then increase the plant share in the high-tax country, which we empirically confirm. Moreover, allowing for transfer pricing makes tax competition tougher and international coordination on transfer-pricing regulation can be beneficial.
The spatial unbundling of parts production and assembly currently characterizes globalization, leading to the worldwide dispersion of pollution. We consider socially optimal (cooperative) environmental taxes in a two-country model of global value chains in which the location of both parts and assembly can differ. When unbundling costs are so high that parts and assembly must colocate in the pre-globalized world, pollution is spatially concentrated, and harmonizing environmental taxes maximizes global welfare. In contrast, with low unbundling costs triggering the dispersion of parts and thus pollution throughout the world as today, harmonization fails to maximize global welfare. Similar results hold when the two countries non-cooperatively choose their environmental taxes.
A salient feature of the current globalization is a loss of manufacturing in developed countries and rapid industrialization in middle-sized developing countries. This paper aims to construct a simple three-country trade and geography model with different market sizes and endogenous wage rates. The large country fosters industrial agglomeration (geographical concentration) in the early stage of globalization, but loses manufacturing in the later stage of globalization. When losing manufacturing, the large country might be worse off. Thus, the large country might have an incentive to implement welfare-maintaining policies to prevent a loss of manufacturing. All of these results can be explained by relative market sizes.
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