Growth Effects of Free Trade under Increasing Returns

This paper addresses the long-term sustainability of the growth effects from trade, within the context of a dynamic optimization model where the investment sector exhibits an initial phase of increasing returns. It is proved that the qualitative properties of trade and growth remain valid, even for decreasing, rather than constant, returns to scale in the consumption sector. That is, trade enables an economy to escape a "poverty trap" and enjoy unbounded growth. Moreover, the asymptotic long-run growth rate of the optimal consumption levels with trade is determined, establishing that trade has a beneficial effect on long-run growth.
JEL Classification Numbers: O41, F12.     

国际服务贸易自由化的收益和成本

伴随着全球服务贸易的飞速发展,服务贸易自由化的收益问题成为众多学者讨论的热门话题。有的学者认为服务贸易自由化有利于降低产品价格、改善服务质量以及节约成本等,因而会给全球带来巨大的收益;而有的学者则提出相反的观点,认为自由化会遏制本国服务业的发展、传播经济危机并危害国家安全。文章在总结许多学者关于国际服务贸易自由化中收益和成本文献的基础上,对我国参与服务贸易自由化提出了相关的建议。     

Monopolistic Competition, Increasing Returns and International Coordination of Entry Policy

This paper presents a new model of monopolistic competition in which firms produce differentiated products under decreasing costs. This model is used to confirm and illustrate the limitations of the excess entry hypothesis, well known in the literature on industrial organization. The validity of the theorem is limited in the sense that it fails to hold in the present model if the properly defined degree of love for variety is sufficiently large. The model is extended to allow for intraindustry trade and to examine the conditions for gains (or losses) from trade in a two-country framework. It is shown how the degree of love for variety affects them. The significance and nature of international coordination of competition policy in the present setting is considered. The degree of love for variety is again shown to be of crucial importance in the characterization of the optimal policy coordination.     

Standard Tax Competition and Increasing Returns

The "race to the bottom" result of the standard tax competition literature implies that capital taxes are competed downward as capital becomes more mobile. The new economic geography literature, in contrast, finds that increasing capital mobility can be associated with a rise in capital tax rates, or a "race to the top." This paper derives the race to the top result from within the standard tax competition modeling framework augmented with agglomeration forces. When agglomeration forces are sufficiently strong, tax competition pressures are mitigated and capital taxes are instead driven by tax exporting incentives.     

Increased Input Supplies,Government Size,Welfare and Trade in the Presence of Increasing Returns

This paper examines the impact of exogenous changes in the supply of primary factors of production on the relative size of government and welfare in the context of a model where increasing returns are present in the production of an intermediate good. It is shown that an increase in the supply of labor (capital) increases the relative size of government if the share of labor is large (small) in the public sector as compared to the private sector. An increase in the supply of capital increases welfare but the impact of an increase in the supply of labor cannot be unambiguously determined. In the context of a North-South model, the paper also considers the pattern of trade. It is shown that North will export capital-intensive intermediate goods to the South. Received September 13, 2001; revised version received June 1, 2002 Published online: February 17, 2003 I am indebted to Professor Bob Catley and two anonymous referees for invaluable comments and suggestions. However, responsibility of any remaining errors or omissions is mine alone.     

Patterns of Trade and Growth Under Increasing Returns: Escape from the Poverty Trap—a Comment

The paper generalizes a two-sector model of trade and growth in which the investment good sector exhibits an initial phase of increasing returns. It dispenses with the restriction that the utility function be of the isoelastic type. Allowing for general concave utility functions, it demonstrates that the qualitative properties of optimal growth and trade patterns are robust with respect to a wide choice of functional forms.
JEL Classification Numbers: O41, F12.     

Regulated Competition under Increasing Returns to Scale

In the classical models of regulation economics, a mechanism that secures truthful revelation involves paying a subsidy to the firm. In this paper, we investigate whether it is possible to create a regulatory mechanism under a no‐subsidy constraint that induces the firm to report its private information truthfully. We consider a number of firms operating under regulated competition and with increasing returns to scale technology. It is shown that in equilibrium each firm chooses to report truthfully without receiving any subsidy. The use of competition may give rise to an efficiency loss due to the increasing returns to scale. However, we show that our mechanism may still be better, from a social welfare point of view, than the case of monopoly regulation that involves no subsidy.     

Increasing Returns, Learning, and Beneficial Tax Competition

We analyze the welfare impact of entrepreneur mobility in a two‐country overlapping generations model. Increasing returns in production yield multiple equilibria that are stable under adaptive learning. Governments compete for the mobile resource by setting income taxes. We show that large welfare gains can arise from noncooperative taxation. If expectational barriers prevent the realization of high output equilibria, tax competition can sufficiently perturb expectations so that high steady states become attainable. Once in a high production regime, governments may institute cooperative tax increases or reductions so as to bring the economy to the global joint optimum without disturbing the regime.     

基于分工和报酬递增的经济增长理论演进

文章对分工、报酬递增和经济增长相关理论的演进进行了梳理和总结.古典经济增长理论奠定了思想基础.其中,斯密理论是通过拓展新的分工实现内生和自我持续增长理论的基础;马克思关于分工形式的划分推进了对于报酬递增机制的认识;杨格开创了分工、报酬递增和经济增长的动态分析思路.内生增长理论以技术进步、知识资本和人力资本积累促进经济增长为核心,将分工和技术进步、知识积累紧密联系起来,以分工为重要分析框架论证报酬递增和长期经济增长的实现,吸收和发展了分工理论.内生增长理论和相关模型分别依循由古典经济学开创的两种分工观进行分析,对分工、报酬递增和经济 增长的相关理论和模型进行了重要扩展和充实.     

International Trade and Currency Exchange

On the international scene, away from national legal rules, the use of different currencies is largely due to the operation of the "Invisible Hand". The paper develops a three-country model of the world economy. This links real trade patterns with currency exchange structures in a general equilibrium framework which includes transaction costs on foreign exchange markets. In the presence of strategic complementarities, there are multiple equilibrium structures of currency exchange for a given underlying real trade pattern. The existence conditions of these different equilibria are characterized, using the trade links between countries as the key parameters. Finally, repercussions on world output of the choice of a currency exchange structure are analysed.
"So much of barbarism, however, still remains in the transactions of most civilized nations, that almost all independent countries choose to assert their nationality by having, to their own inconvenience and that of their neighbours, a peculiar currency of their own."
John Stuart Mill, 1848.     

Institutional Quality and International Trade

Institutions—quality of contract enforcement, property rights, shareholder protection, and the like—have received a great deal of attention in recent years. Yet trade theory has not considered the implications of institutional differences, beyond treating them simply as different technologies or taxes. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we propose a simple model of international trade in which institutional differences are modelled within the framework of incomplete contracts. We show that doing so reverses many of the conclusions obtained by equating institutions with productivity. Institutional differences as a source of comparative advantage imply, among other things, that the less developed country may not gain from trade and factor prices may actually diverge as a result of trade. Second, we test empirically whether institutions act as a source of trade, using data on U.S. imports disaggregated by country and industry. The empirical results provide evidence of "institutional content of trade": institutional differences are an important determinant of trade flows.     

技术性壁垒与我国的对外贸易

随着关税壁垒作用日益削弱,技术性贸易壁垒(TBT)作为更隐蔽而且作用更强大的壁垒,已在客观上成为我国出口贸易的巨大障碍。目前技术性壁垒已经取代反倾销措施,成为阻碍我国出口贸易发展的第一大非关税壁垒。加入WTO后,我国的出口贸易将面临发达国家技术性壁垒的严峻挑战。     

Equilibria with Increasing Returns: Sufficient Conditions on Bounded Production Allocations

This paper deals with the existence of marginal pricing equilibrium or equilibrium with general pricing rules in an economy with increasing returns to scale or more general types of nonconvexities in production. Its main contribution is to demonstrate existence of equilibrium with bounded loss and survival assumptions required only on a bounded subset of production allocations. Furthermore, we require only a weakened form of the free‐disposal assumption and we also allow nonpositive prices.     

对当前我国外汇储备基金实现投资增值的思考

外汇储备必须在满足流动性和安全性前提下,拓展投资渠道,控制投资风险,提高投资收益.近几年来,我国外汇储备持续高企,而外汇储备基金投资却只有3%的营运收益率.本文分析了我国外汇储备基金投资增值的现状,从区分管理功能和投资功能,组建高效基金运营模式;设定投资基准和投资限额,控制和规避投资风险;优化外汇储备的货币结构和资产结构,拓宽投资渠道;加快培养吸纳国际金融市场操作人才,完善有关法规等几个方面提出了改进外汇储备基金投资增值的对策.     

Domestic Trade and Transport Costs in International Trade Theory

This paper examines the effects that domestic trade and transport margins have on international trade and the consequences for the central trade theorems. Specifically, the Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson model is expanded to include a third industry that produces the nontraded domestic services in transportation, warehousing, wholesaling and retailing required to market goods to final purchasers. It is found that the domestic margins probably impose substantial natural trade barriers and that they can cause the central trade theorems (factor-price equalization, Stolper-Samuelson, and Rybczynski) to fail. [F11]     

Political Proximity and International Trade

The impact of politics on international trade has often been excluded by economists both from theoretical and empirical analysis. In this study, we examine empirically the impact of politics on trade flows. Results indicate that political differences have an impact on bilateral trade that is robust to a wide range of econometric specifications. However, the impact of political differences on trade flows vanishes when the costs of reducing the latter become fairly important.     

Cost Sharing under Increasing Returns: A Comparison of Simple Mechanisms

A technology with decreasing marginal costs is used by agents with equal rights. Each agent demands a quantity of output and costs are divided by means of a fixed formula. Several such mechanisms are compared for the existence of Nash equilibrium demand profiles and for the equity properties of these equilibria. Among three mechanisms, average cost pricing, the Shapley–Shubik cost sharing, and serial cost-sharing, only the latter two possess at least one Nash equilibrium on a reasonable domain of individual preferences. Only the serial cost sharing equilibria pass the equity tests of No Envy and Stand Alone cost.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C72, D63.     

Factor Supplies, Welfare and Output When Non-traded Intermediate Production Has Increasing Returns

This paper considers the impact of an exogenous change in the supply of primary factors on output levels, relative prices and welfare in the presence of output generated increasing returns to scale. Unlike the existing studies, this paper utilises a model of a small open economy where increasing returns do not occur in the production of a traded final good but in the production of a non-traded intermediate good. Within the context of the present study, it is shown that the Rybczynski theorem is unlikely to hold and an increase in the supply of either primary factor can harm welfare.     

中国城乡教育收益率差异与收入差距

本文利用CHNS数据,研究了历次调查年份分城乡和性别的教育收益率的动态变化。研究发现,分城乡和性别的教育收益率都基本呈现逐年递增的趋势,但城镇的教育收益率总是高于农村,而无论是城镇还是农村,女性的教育收益率都高于男性。从动态变化来看,自2000年以来城乡教育收益率的差异逐年加大,其中主要是城乡男性劳动力的教育收益率差距增大。本文的研究表明,除教育水平本身的差异以外,教育收益率差异的扩大也是引起城乡收入差距加剧的重要原因。     

International Trade Union Organizations

An attempt is made in this article to demonstrate that Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes erected a number of signposts that point in the direction of a normative, institutional and policy-oriented social economics of labor. They opined that dysfunctioning institutions had thrown most members of the working class into an abyss of poverty. According to Marshall, poverty was caused by institutional neglect of education for the masses. Hence he recommended a drastic overhaul of those institutions that impinged on education. Keynes argued that the rentiers were the villains because they had intentionally reduced their funding of entrepreneurial investments. Consequently, investments dwindled and unemployment caused working-class poverty to rise above its customary levels. Keynes's solution was public investment in private enterprises, which he called socialization of investment. This would cause euthanasia of the anti-social rentiers. Because of their recommendations, Marshall and Keynes called themselves socialists.