Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-1-1993

Keywords

smuggling, illegal exports, taxes, illegal trade

Abstract

This paper proposes a model of joint product smuggling which explicitly examines the roles of uncertainty, enforcement, taxes, and the magnitude of a real resource cost in determining the firm's decision to smuggle and smuggling's impact on welfare and tax revenue collection. A framework is presented in which: 1) the tax rate, 2) the level of government enforcement, and 3) the real resource cost are analyzed to determine their impact on a firm's decision to smuggle or engage in strictly legal trade. The results derived in the paper indicate that the implied policy solution for the smuggling problem arrived at in the earlier literature of "the less smuggling the better" is at best misleading.

Publisher

Department of Economics, South Dakota State University

Series Number

93-8

Number of Pages

35

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