We investigate the impact of per-unit duties (i.e. tariffs expressed in US dollars per unit of imported product) on world agricultural trade patterns. Using detailed data on trade and tariffs, we show first that they induce higher export unit values, confirming that the Alchian–Allen conjecture can be extended to per-unit duties. Second, we show that this effect is higher for developed countries, which can be explained by their specialization on high-priced products. Third, we find that the restrictive effect of per-unit duties on trade is higher for developing countries.

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Trade elasticity is a crucial parameter in evaluating the welfare impacts of trade liberalization. We estimate trade elasticities at the product level (6-digit of the Harmonized System) by exploiting the variation in bilateral applied tariffs for each product category. The obtained trade elasticities are centered around-5. We show that using homogeneous-instead of product-specific-trade elasticity implies a downward bias in welfare gains from trade in particular for developing countries.