Strategic trade policy with interlocking cross-ownership

By analysing interlocking cross-ownership, this work reconsiders the inefficiency of activist governments that set subsidies for their exporters (Brander and Spencer, J Int Econ 18:83-100). Making use of a third-market Cournot duopoly model, we show that the implementation of strategic trade policy in the form of a tax (subsidy) when goods are differentiated (complements) is Pareto-superior to free trade within precise ranges of firms' cross-ownership, richly depending on the degree of product competition. These results challenge the conventional ones in which public intervention (1) is always the provision of a subsidy and (2) always leads to a Pareto-inferior (resp. Pareto-superior) equilibrium when products are substitutes (resp. complements).