Modeling Technical Trade Barriers under Uncertainty

Abstract

As traditional forms of agricultural protection continue to decline, agricultural interests will likely seek alternative protection in the form of technical barriers. A flexible framework for theoretically and empirically analyzing technical barriers under various sources of uncertainty is derived. Attention is focused on uncertainty arising from the variation in the product attribute levels, a source not yet considered by the literature. Ex ante and ex post densities of domestic and international quantities and prices as well as the densities of their respective extreme-order statistics are derived. An example is presented to illustrate the application of the developed framework.

Keywords

• nontariff barriers
• trade modeling
• uncertainty