International trade in telecommunications

the long version

Ronald A. Cass and John Haring explore the issues relevant to selecting an appropriate trade policy for telecommunication equipment and products with similar characteristics. The authors use only the simplest instruments in the economists's toolkit. They eschew devices that noneconomists use for assessing good policy because those tend to provide better arguments than answers and often restate economic issues in other terms. They also abjure relying on the more sophisticated analytical tools that many academic economists favor because those tools, while helpful in many circumstances, seldom resolve policy issues with the information available to policymakers. Cass and Haring argue that the simpler tools do not allow them to escape the need for data but do facilitate decisionmaking on the sort of information that is generally available or that, for the most part, can be estimated with relative confidence. The authors advise policymakers to take open trade as the baseline and to move away from it only when the gains are clear and the arguments compelling.