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Abstract
This paper examines the effects of liberalizing tariffs and textile export quotas under Viet Nam’s accession to the WTO. To undertake the analysis, we develop a model of Viet Nam’s economy that reflects the importance of the duty exemption arrangements that allow export-oriented manufacturers to obtain intermediate inputs at world prices. The resulting GTAP-DD model is applied first to Viet Nam’s fourth multilateral tariff offer, and then to a hypothetical, deeper offer that takes Viet Nam’s average tariff below a simple average of 10 percent. The fourth offer is estimated to generate global gains of $460 million per year, of which over 60 percent accrues to Viet Nam. The deeper tariff experiment leads to annual gains of around $600 million per year, with $376 million accruing to Viet Nam. Under the fourth offer, most of the gains accrue from liberalization of the textile quotas, while the gains are roughly evenly split between tariff reform and textile quota abolition under the deeper reform scenario.