• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.399-410
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• 2011

Traditionally, tariffs have been used to protect domestic industries. In particular, a country with more bargaining power makes a punitive threat to maintain a certain level of market share in the market of other country. In this paper, we study the effect of punitive tariffs on an irrelevant industry. In particular, when a country tries to achieve a market share or quantity target in an industry, we examine the effect of threats to impose tariffs on the major export of another industries which are irrelevant to the targeted industry. Using a simple duopoly model, we show that there is a Cournot-Nash equilibrium which supports that a country has an incentive to resolve a trade dispute voluntarily to protect its major export industry under the credible treat of punitive tariffs. This result is mainly due to the fact that the trade policy of a country concerns the aggregate benefits from trade over all its export industries. To obtain this result, this paper employs the linkage between the targeted and irrelevant industries by using the lobby of the irrelevant industry to curb the targeted industry. A lot of recent bilateral trade agreements can be applied to our results.