This paper generalizes the Grossman-Helpman political economy model to characterize the structure of environmental and industry protection for a small open economy when domestic and/or trade policies are the outcome of a noncooperative common agency game between sector-specific producer lobbies and the government. For a consumption externality, the political equilibrium results if domestic and trade policies are available, are production-enhancing protection of organized industries, but the same environmental protection as Pigouvian taxes. Subsidies to organized industries counterbalance environmental taxes when there is a production externality, and it is ambiguous whether domestic or trade policy alone leads to more environmental protection. In addition, this paper demonstrates that the original Grossman-Helpman results arise as a special case that rests on the assumption that only trade policies are available to the government.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium in its series Working Papers with number
51207.