Person:
Bown, Chad P.

Development Research Group, World Bank
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International Trade Policy; WTO
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Development Research Group, World Bank
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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.
Citations 235 Scopus

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Publication
    What Do We Know About Preferential Trade Agreements and Temporary Trade Barriers?
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06) Bown, Chad P.; Tovar, Patricia
    Two of the most important trade policy developments to take place since the 1980s are the expansion of preferential trade agreements and temporary trade barriers, such as antidumping, safeguards, and countervailing duties. Despite the empirical importance of preferential trade agreements and temporary trade barriers and the common feature that each can independently have quite discriminatory elements, relatively little is known about the nature of any relationships between them. This paper surveys the literature on some of the political-economic issues that can arise at the intersection of preferential trade agreements and temporary trade barriers and uses four case studies to illustrate variation in how countries apply the World Trade Organization's global safeguards policy instrument. The four examples include recent policies applied by a variety of types of countries and under different agreements: large and small countries, high-income and emerging economies, and free trade areas and customs unions. The analysis reveals important measurement and identification challenges for research that seeks to find evidence of systematic relationships between the formation of preferential trade agreements, the political-economic implications of their implementation, and the use of subsequent temporary trade barriers.
  • Publication
    Trade Liberalization, Antidumping, and Safeguards: Evidence from India's Tariff Reform
    (2011) Bown, Chad P.
    This paper is the first to use product-level data to examine empirically whether countries use antidumping and safeguard exceptions to unwind commitments to lower tariffs in the face of domestic political-economic pressure. We focus on the case of India, a country that underwent a major exogenous tariff reform program in the early 1990s and subsequently initiated substantial use of safeguard and antidumping import restrictions. We first estimate structural determinants of India's import protection using the Grossman and Helpman (1994) model and provide evidence from its pre-reform tariff data of 1990 that is consistent with the theory. We then re-estimate the model on the Indian tariff data after the trade liberalization is complete and find that the model no longer fits, a result consistent with theory and evidence provided in other settings that India's 1991-1992 IMF arrangement can be interpreted as resulting in an exogenous shock to India's tariff policy. However, when we re-estimate the model on data from 2000-2002 that more completely reflects India's cross-product variation in import protection by including both its post-reform tariffs and its additional non-tariff barriers of antidumping and safeguard import protection, the significance of the Grossman and Helpman model determinant estimates is restored. We interpret these combined results as evidence that India unwound its commitment to reduce tariffs through use of antidumping and safeguard protection in the face of political-economic pressure. The estimates are also economically important and provide one explanation for separate results in the literature that the magnitude of import reduction associated with India's use of antidumping is similar to the initial import expansion associated with its tariff reform. Finally, we interpret the implications of our results for the burgeoning research literature examining the effects of liberalization on India's micro-level development.
  • Publication
    Preferential Liberalization, Antidumping, and Safeguards: Stumbling Block Evidence from MERCOSUR
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-10) Bown, Chad P.
    There is not yet consensus in the trade agreements literature as to whether preferential liberalization leads to more or less multilateral liberalization. However, research thus far has focused mostly on tariff measures of import protection. This paper develops more comprehensive measures of trade policy that include the temporary trade barrier policies of antidumping and safeguards. Studies in other contexts have also shown how these policies can erode some of the trade liberalization gains that arise when examining tariffs alone. This paper examines the experiences of Argentina and Brazil during the formation of the MERCOSUR over 1990-2001. The study finds that an exclusive focus on applied tariffs may lead to a mischaracterization of the relationship between preferential liberalization and liberalization toward non-member countries. First, any "building block" evidence that arises by focusing on tariffs during the period in which MERCOSUR was only a free trade area can disappear, once the analysis includes changes in import protection arise through temporary trade barriers. Furthermore, there is also evidence of a "stumbling block" effect of preferential tariff liberalization for the period in which MERCOSUR became a customs union, and this result tends to strengthen with the inclusion of temporary trade barriers. Finally, the paper provides a first empirical examination of whether market power motives can help explain the patterns of changes in import protection that are observed in these settings.