NBER Publications by Yan Dong

Because China's economic structure is different from that in OECD countries, using conventional neo-classical competitive trade models to analyze the welfare and trade impacts of trade related policy change can be misleading. In particular, both the exchange rate regime and output and pricing policies of state owned enterprises (SOE's) will have effects on trade and welfare which differ from a classical competitive model. This paper present a numerical model that captures the combined and interactive effects of three policy elements in prototype form of tariffs, policy towards SOEs in the industrial sector, and an exchange rate regime supporting large trade surpluses and additions to foreign reserves. The model has non neutral monetary features, endogenous trade imbalances and average prod...

This paper presents both analytics and numerical simulation results relevant to proposals for carbon motivated regional trade agreements summarized in Dong & Whalley(2008). Unlike traditional regional trade agreements, by lowing tariffs on participant’s low carbon emission goods and setting penalties on outsiders to force them to join such agreements , carbon motivated regional trade agreements reflect an effective merging of trade and climate change regimes, and are rising in profile as part of the post 2012 Copenhagen UNFCC negotiation. By adding country energy extraction cost functions, we develop a multi-region general equilibrium structure with endogenously determined energy supply. We calibrate our model to business as usual scenarios for the period 2006-2036. Our results show that c...

This paper discusses both the potential contribution that trade policy initiatives can make towards the achievement of significant global carbon emissions reduction and the potential impacts of proposals now circulating for carbon reduction motivated geographical trade arrangements, including carbon free trade areas. We first suggest that trade policy is likely to be a relatively minor consideration in climate change containment. The dominant influence on carbon emissions globally for next several decades will be growth more so than trade and its composition, and in turn, the size of trade seemingly matters more than its composition given differences in emission intensity between tradables and nontradables. We also note that differences in emissions intensity across countries are larger th...