贸易、FDI和企业的组织形式

1．前言国际贸易和外国直接投资(FDI)一直以来都身居全球增长最快的经济活动之列。2003年,全球货物出口额直逼73,000亿美元,全球商业服务出口额将近18,000亿美元；同时,全球FDI流入额也接近5,600亿美元。然而,在1990年到2001年跨国公司海外分支机构营业收入的扩张速度甚至要比全球货物出口和非要素服务出口的迅猛增长快得多。服务业FDI前所未有的扩张是该增长的一个显著特点：1990年,服务业FDI流入累积额为9,500亿美元,而到了2002年,该数值已增加到40,000亿美元。2001-2002年,投资到服务业的FDI占总FDI流入额的2/3。     

Growth,technological progress,and trade

I would like to thank Gene Grossman for allowing me to use insights from our joint ongoing work in the preparation of this paper, and to Paul Romer and Martin Weitzman for comments on an earlier draft.     

Optimal integration strategies for the multinational firm

We examine integration strategies of multinational firms that face a rich array of choices of international organization. Each firm must provide headquarter services from its home country, but can produce its intermediate inputs and conduct assembly operations in one or more of three locations. We study the equilibrium choices of firms that differ in productivity levels, focusing on the role that industry characteristics such as the fixed costs of foreign subsidiaries, the cost of transporting intermediate and final goods, and the regional composition of the consumer market play in determining the optimal integration strategies.     

Negotiating free trade

We develop a dynamic bargaining model in which a leading country endogenously decides whether to sequentially negotiate free trade agreements with subsets of countries or engage in simultaneous multilateral bargaining with all countries at once. We show how the structure of coalition externalities shapes the choice between sequential and multilateral bargaining, and we identify circumstances in which the grand coalition is the equilibrium outcome, leading to worldwide free trade. A model of international trade is then used to illustrate equilibrium outcomes and how they depend on the structure of trade and protection. Global free trade is not achieved when the political-economy motive for protection is sufficiently large. Furthermore, the model generates both “building bloc” and “stumbling bloc” effects of preferential trade agreements. In particular, we describe an equilibrium in which global free trade is attained only when preferential trade agreements are permitted to form (a building bloc effect), and an equilibrium in which global free trade is attained only when preferential trade agreements are forbidden (a stumbling bloc effect). The analysis identifies conditions under which each of these outcomes emerges.     

The role of saving and investment in exchange rate determination under alternative monetary mechanisms

We argue that the demand for national currencies depends on existing payment arrangements for imports and exports. Therefore, exchange rate movements depend on these arrangement. As a result, the relationship between exchange rate movements and various macroeconomic aggregates — like saving and investment — depend on what we call the monetary mechanism. These points are explicitly demonstrated by studying two extreme monetary mechanisms, one in which all payments are done with the seller's currency and one in which all payments are done with the buyer's currency.     

Adjusting to a New Technology: Experience and Training

How does the economy react to the arrival of a new major technology? The existing literature on general-purpose technologies (GPTs) has studied the role that mechanisms like secondary innovations, diffusion, and learning by firms play in the adjustment process. By contrast, we focus on a new mechanism: the interplay between technological change and two types of human capital—technology-specific experience and education. We show that technological change that requires more education and training, like computerization, necessarily produces an initial slowdown. On the other hand, technological change that lowers the training requirements, like the move from the artisan shop to the factory, can produce either a bust or a boom. We identify three key properties that determine the outcome: (1) the productivity of inexperienced workers, (2) the speed with which experience raises productivity, and (3) the level of general skills required to operate the new technology.     

On optimal community formations

It is shown that in an economy of identical individuals in which there are two communities with identical ex-ante features, optimal resource allocation may require to form communities of different size. This allocation cannot be supported without federal coordination, except for one special case.     

Towards a consistent comparison of alternative exchange rate systems

Equilibrium allocations of alternative exchange rate regimes are compared in an intertemporal framework. When money serves only as a store of value, the same real allocations are attainable under all regimes. However, if money also serves other functions, there are equilibria under the fixed rate system that eliminate those under floating rates, and vice versa.