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Cover -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1 Introduction -- Methodological Approach -- Principal Results -- Some Caveats -- Appendix 1.1 Does Price Equalization Improve Welfare? -- Chapter 2 Measuring Barriers and the Benefits of Integration: Existing Studies -- Approaches to Measuring Trade Barriers -- Welfare Effects -- Chapter 3 Fragmentation among OECD Countries -- Data Issues -- Our Approach -- Consumer Prices -- Producer Prices -- Fragmentation Measures -- European Integration -- US-Canada Integration -- Concluding Comments -- Chapter 4 The Welfare Effects of Integration -- Welfare Analysis -- Winners and Losers -- Additional Description of the Model and Methodology -- Appendix 4.1 Confidence Intervals -- Index -- References.

AbstractThis paper uses a single‐sector dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous households to analyse Japanese immigration policy. We examine the effects on output, consumption, factor prices, and utility. We do this for both steady states and transition paths. We find that: (a) aggregate output, investment, and consumption in Japan are likely to rise with any sort of loosening of immigration restrictions; (b) allowing more skilled immigration generates greater aggregate changes; (c) raising skilled immigration relative to unskilled immigration drives down skilled workers' wages, consumption, and utility, while cutting the skilled to unskilled immigration share has the opposite effects; and (d) such immigration policy changes have small effects compared to those that occur naturally due to business cycle fluctuations

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Annotation, How important are the remaining barriers to integration in international goods markets and how would eliminating them affect global and individual countries' welfare? This book studies these questions using the most comprehensive price data available. Bradford and Lawrence find that there is considerable market fragmentation among industrial countries -- that is, firms charging different prices for similar products in different national markets -- even among countries with low tariff barriers. The authors estimate that integration among the eight countries in their sample -- Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States -- would raise global GDP by more than $500 billion, or about 2 percent. Remarkably, almost half the global gain in these eight countries could be reaped if Japan alone eliminated its international fragmentation