Nottingham Centre for Research on
Globalisation and Economic Policy (GEP)

GEP Research Paper 04/07

Tariffs, licensing and market structure

Arijit Mukherjee and Enrico Pennings

Abstract

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that exclusive owners of an advanced technology are always better off when producing as a monopolist than when competing against another firm. Competition against a less efficient firm weakens the power that a host country can exert on the incumbent in the form of its tariff policy. We show that this gives a motive for a monopolist to license its technology to another foreign firm. A host country gains more from increased competition if it can induce the foreign incumbent to transfer technology to the host country firm. We show that the host country can do so by tariff commitment.

Issued in March 2004.

This paper is available in PDF format .

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