Person:
Bown, Chad P.

Development Research Group, World Bank

Fields of Specialization

International Trade Policy; WTO

External Links

Chad P. Bown
Peterson Institute
SSRN
RePEc

Departments

Development Research Group, World Bank

Last updated January 31, 2023

Biography

Chad P. Bown, Reginald Jones Senior Fellow since March 2018, joined the Peterson Institute for International Economics as a senior fellow in April 2016. His research examines international trade laws and institutions, trade negotiations, and trade disputes. With Soumaya Keynes, he cohosts Trade Talks, a weekly podcast on the economics of international trade policy. Bown previously served as senior economist for international trade and investment in the White House on the Council of Economic Advisers and most recently as a lead economist at the World Bank, conducting research and advising developing country governments on international trade policy for seven years. Bown was a tenured professor of economics at Brandeis University, where he held a joint appointment in the Department of Economics and International Business School for 12 years. Bown received a BA magna cum laude in economics and international relations from Bucknell University and a PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently a member of the advisory board of the Bucknell Institute for Public Policy.

Full item page

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 40

Trade Policy Flexibilities and Turkey : Tariffs, Antidumping, Safeguards, and WTO Dispute Settlement

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-01) Bown, Chad P.

Trade policy commitments to lower import tariffs and to maintain tariffs at low levels entail short and long-run political-economic costs and benefits. Empirical work examining the relationship between such commitments and the exercise of trade policy flexibilities is still relatively nascent, especially for emerging economies. This paper provides a rich, empirically-based assessment of ways that Turkey exercised trade policy flexibilities during the global economic crisis of 2008-11. First, and despite multilateral and customs union commitments that might limit changes to applied tariffs, Turkey made changes to both its applied Most Favored Nation and preferential tariffs that cumulatively affect nearly 9 percent of manufacturing imports and 10 percent of import product lines. Second, Turkey's cumulative application of temporary trade barrier (TTB) policies -- antidumping, safeguards and countervailing duties -- are estimated to impact by 2011 an additional 4 percent of imports and 6 percent of product lines. Other surprising results on Turkey's use of flexibilities include: extending the duration of previously imposed antidumping and safeguards beyond expected removal dates, removing one TTB policy over a set of products and immediately reapplying a different TTB policy, covering lengthy upstream and downstream segments of important industries, and deepening discriminatory preference margins already inherent in existing preferential trade agreements.
How Different are Safeguards from Antidumping? Evidence from US Trade Policies toward Steel

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-03) Bown, Chad P.

Use of temporary trade barriers has proliferated across countries, industries, and even policy instruments. This paper constructs a panel of bilateral, product-level United States steel imports that are matched to a unique data set on trade policy exclusions that are associated with the 2002 United States steel safeguard in order to compare the trade impacts that result from application of various temporary trade barrier policies over 1989-2003. The analysis finds that the trade effects of an applied safeguard -- which is statutorily expected to follow the principle of nondiscriminatory treatment -- can nevertheless compare closely with the application of the explicitly discriminatory antidumping policy. The results on trade policy substitutability complement other recent research on these increasingly important forms of import protection.
Emerging Economies, Trade Policy, and Macroeconomic Shocks

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-01) Bown, Chad P. ; Crowley, Meredith A.

This paper estimates the impact of aggregate fluctuations on the time-varying trade policies of 13 major emerging economies over 1989-2010. By 2010, these World Trade Organization member countries collectively accounted for 21 percent of world merchandise imports and 22 percent of world gross domestic product. The paper examines determinants of carefully constructed, bilateral measures of new import restrictions on products arising through the temporary trade barrier (TTB) policies of antidumping, safeguards, and countervailing duties. The approach explicitly addresses changes to the institutional environment facing these emerging economies as they joined the WTO and adopted disciplines to restrain their application of other trade policies, such as applied import tariffs. The paper presents evidence of a counter-cyclical relationship between macroeconomic shocks and new TTB import restrictions in addition to an important role for fluctuations in bilateral real exchange rates. Furthermore, for the subset of major Group of 20 emerging economies, the trade policy responsiveness coinciding with WTO establishment in 1995 suggests a significant change relative to the pre-WTO period; i.e., new import restrictions became more counter-cyclical over time. Finally, the paper documents evidence on changes to some of these empirical relationships coinciding with the Great Recession.
Participation in WTO Dispute Settlement : Complainants, Interested Parties, and Free Riders

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2005-08-24) Bown, Chad P.

What affects a country's decision of whether to formally engage in a trade dispute directly related to its exporting interests? This article empirically examines determinants of affected country participation decisions in formal trade litigation arising under the World Trade Organization (WTO) between 1995 and 2000. It investigates determinants of nonparticipation and examines whether the incentives generated by the system's rules and procedures discourage active engagement in dispute settlement by developing country members in particular. Though the size of exports at stake is found to be an important economic determinant affecting the decision to participate in challenges to a WTO-inconsistent policy, the evidence also shows that measures of a country's retaliatory and legal capacity as well as its international political economy relationships matter. These results are consistent with the hypothesis of an implicit 'institutional bias' generated by the system's rules and incentives that particularly affects developing economy participation in dispute settlement.
The Great Recession and Import Protection : The Role of Temporary Trade Barriers

(London: Centre for Economic Policy Research and the World Bank, 2011) Bown, Chad P. ; Bown, Chad P.

The great recession of 2008-9 caused a negative shock to the global economy that is comparable with the great depression of the 1930s. The major advanced nations experienced painful economic contraction, severe dislocation to industrial production and sharp spikes in unemployment. Trade flows collapsed across all the regions of the world. The rest of this introductory chapter proceeds as follows. Next, the report provide a more detailed timeline and summary of events in the great recession, including its macroeconomic and trade impacts, the uncertainty over trade policy in 2008-9, and the response to calls for additional monitoring of trade policy. In particular, section one highlight the real time monitoring efforts of the World Bank's global antidumping database and subsequent temporary trade barriers (TTBs) database. These contributions have addressed some of the immediate concern about the unknown scale of protectionism taking place in 2008-9, but they have also revealed a lack of informational preparedness that has ultimately spurred this volume's research. In section two, the author introduce a relatively simple methodological framework to improve intertemporal assessment of the scope of TTB use, an approach that many of the volume's chapters adopt or modify to construct better measures of the 'stock' and 'flow' of imported products that countries subject to TTBs. (A more technical description of the methodology is provided in the Appendix (section six), along with details of the many common data sources used across the subsequent chapters.) What are the empirical results? Section three provides a simple application of this methodology and finds that, during the crisis, these economies collectively increased by 25 percent the imported products that they subjected to TTB import protection. Nevertheless, it turns out this collective expansion in TTB coverage during 2008-9 was dominated by emerging economies. Developing countries used TTBs to cover 39 percent more imported products by the end of 2009 compared with 2007, whereas recession-ravaged high-income economies surprisingly increased their coverage by only 4 percent. However, it is also clear from the data that understanding these crisis changes demands recognition of longer term trends. Thus, given these high-level results, Section 4 turns to a number of common questions that the subsequent chapters investigate, on an economy-by-economy basis, in more detail. This section provides a short preview of how the volume's authors subsequently address these questions by placing the trade policy changes of 2008-9 into historical context. Section five then concludes.
Trade Policy Instruments over Time

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-01) Bown, Chad P.

This paper surveys political-economic research on the variety of instruments that governments use to conduct international trade policy. It presents key insights on the relationships between instruments such as tariffs, quotas, voluntary export restraints, and other nontariff barriers, as well as the ebb and flow of the national use of temporary trade barriers such as antidumping, countervailing duties, and safeguards. The survey examines trends in use of these trade policy instruments over recent history; and it reviews the major theoretical and empirical explanations behind, and interrelationships between, their uses. Finally, the paper highlights potential institutional impacts of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and subsequent World Trade Organization (WTO) on choice of policy instruments, as well as how multilateral, unilateral, and preferential tariff liberalization may introduce political-economic shocks and affect incentives over time for how governments rely on different instruments.
The World Trade Organization and Antidumping in Developing Countries

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-09) Bown, Chad P.

Since the 1995 inception of the World Trade Organization (WTO), developing countries have become some of the most frequent users of the WTO-sanctioned antidumping trade policy instrument. This paper exploits newly available data to examine the pattern of actual industrial use of antidumping in nine of the major "new user" developing countries - Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, Turkey and Venezuela. For these countries we are able to match data from two newly available sources: data on production in 28 different 3-digit ISIC industries from the Trade, Production and Protection Database to data on antidumping investigations, outcomes and imports at the 6-digit Harmonized System (HS) product level from the Global Antidumping Database. Our econometric analysis is to estimate a two-stage model of the industry-level decision to pursue an antidumping investigation and the national government's decision of whether and how much antidumping import protection to provide. First, we find evidence consistent with the theory of endogenous trade policy: larger industries that face substantial import competition are more likely to pursue an antidumping investigation, and larger and more concentrated industries receive greater antidumping protection from imports. Second, we find that industries that use antidumping are more likely to face the changing economic conditions specified by the technical evidentiary criteria of the WTO Antidumping Agreement: industries that face rapidly falling import prices are more likely to pursue an investigation, and industries that are more susceptible to cyclical dumping due to greater capital investment expenditures and that face rapidly increasing competition from imports receive greater antidumping protection.
Trade Remedies and World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement : Why Are So Few Challenged?

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-03) Bown, Chad P.

Antidumping and related trade remedies are the most popular policy instruments that many of the largest importing countries in the World Trade Organization (WTO) system use to restrict international trade. While such trade remedies are also frequent targets of dispute settlement activity under the WTO, given that Panel and Appellate Body rulings have almost invariably found that some aspect of each reviewed remedy was inconsistent with WTO obligations, an open research question is why aren't more remedies targeted by dispute settlement? The author provides a first empirical investigation of the trade remedy and WTO dispute settlement interaction by focusing on determinants of WTO members' decisions of whether to formally challenge U.S. trade remedies imposed between 1992 and 2003. He provides evidence that it is not only the size of the economic market at stake and the capacity to retaliate under potential DSU (dispute settlement understanding)-authorized sanctions that influence the litigation decision of whether to formally challenge a measure at the WTO. The author also finds that if the negatively affected foreign industry has the capacity to directly retaliate through a reciprocal antidumping investigation and measure of its own, its government is less likely to pursue the case on its behalf at the WTO. This is consistent with the theory that potential complainants may be avoiding WTO litigation in favor of pursuing reciprocal antidumping and hence "vigilante justice."
Developing Countries and Enforcement of Trade Agreements : Why Dispute Settlement is Not Enough

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-12) Bown, Chad P. ; Bernard M., Hoekman

Poor countries are rarely challenged in formal World Trade Organization trade disputes for failing to live up to commitments, reducing the benefits of their participation in international trade agreements. This paper examines the political-economic causes of the failure to challenge poor countries, and discusses the static and dynamic costs and externality implications of this failure. Given the weak incentives to enforce World Trade Organization rules and disciplines against small and poor members, bolstering the transparency function of the World Trade Organization is important for making trade agreements more relevant to trade constituencies in developing countries. Although the paper focuses on the World Trade Organization system, the arguments also apply to reciprocal North-South trade agreements.
Emerging Economies and the Emergence of South-South Protectionism

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-08) Bown, Chad P.

Do exports resume when import-restricting temporary trade barriers such as antidumping are finally removed? To establish the importance of this question for emerging economies, this paper uses newly available data from the World Bank's Temporary Trade Barriers Database to update a number of inter-temporal indicators of import protection along three dimensions: additional time coverage through 2011, additional policy-imposing country coverage, and a more comprehensive depiction of impacted trading partner coverage. It then turns to the emerging economy exporters affected by temporary trade barriers and highlights the economic significance of frequently bilateral import restrictions imposed by other emerging economies, i.e., South-South protectionism. Finally, it then investigates empirically whether country-level exports resume when the previously imposed -- but temporary -- import protection is finally removed. China's exporters respond quickly and aggressively to the market access opening embodied in the removal of such import restrictions. This differs markedly from the slow and tepid export response of other emerging economies, especially when the import protection had been imposed by another emerging economy trading partner. This evidence suggests a previously unidentified long-run cost associated with such South-South protectionism that merits further research and inquiry.