市场一体化、非对称性贸易成本与制造业集聚*

国内市场一体化将会对中国制造业的空间分布造成何种影响？本文通过构建统一的理论分析框架验证了国内市场一体化影响制造业集聚的两种机制：其一是贸易成本总体水平的调节效应,其二是贸易成本非对称性的直接效应,而调节效应的方向则取决于模型理论范式选择。此外,本文基于中国区域间投入产出数据,系统地测算了中国地区间的非对称双边贸易成本,并基于测算结果进行回归分析。实证结果表明,在中国制造业发展初期,市场结构总体符合IRS MC范式设定,此时贸易成本的调节效应倾向于促进制造业在东部沿海区域集聚。伴随着制造业生产技术的成熟,制造业市场结构开始呈现CRS PC范式特征,此时市场一体化对制造业集聚的调节效应不再显著。     

INTERNATIONAL AND INTRA‐NATIONAL TRADE: A CONTINUUM APPROACH*

We build up a Ricardian trade model with multiple regions within a nation and examine how international trade determines interregional patterns of production and specialization. We show that the degree of interregional concentration of economic activities moves in different directions in two trading nations. The role of “absolute advantage” becomes crucial in dictating the course of income disparity across regions. We discuss cases with varying degrees of labour mobility and reconfirm the result on post‐trade interregional concentration and dispersion. Later we explore the impact of “scale factor” in this model and show how principle of comparative advantage and economies of scale interact to determine the pattern of specialization and volume of trade.     

TRADE IMPACTS ON SKILL ACQUISITION VIA VARIETY EXPANSION*

We show that trade enhances skill formation through gains from trade via variety expansion à la Krugman. Although workers are identical as unskilled labour, they differ in productivity as skilled labour. Workers become skilled by incurring training costs. By introducing these settings into a trade model with monopolistic competition, we show that, although trade makes all agents better off, its effect is stronger for skilled than unskilled workers, which stimulates skill acquisition. As a result of less productive workers becoming skilled, the wage dispersion among skilled workers increases.     

STRATEGIC TRADE AND DELEGATED COMPETITION WITH ENDOGENOUS QUALITY CHOICE: IS EXPORT POLICY NEEDED?

This paper introduces the relative‐performance contract into a vertically differentiated product market and examines how the optimal trade policy and quality choice respond to the incentive mechanism. We find that the high quality firm makes better use of the delegation than the low quality firm in a cross‐border decentralized model. The main difference between the present paper and the strategic trade theory literature is that in this paper the optimal policy is free trade, which does not depend on whether firms compete by prices or quantities, and on whether the goods are substitutes or full complements.     

MONOPOLISTIC COMPETITION WITH EFFICIENCY GAPS AND A HECKSCHER‐OHLIN TRADE PATTERN*

We develop a two‐factor, three‐sector model of international trade in which the monopolistically competitive firms are characterized by different fixed production costs. We show that, depending on the pattern of the international distribution of factor endowments, the trade pattern is determined not only by relative factor endowments as suggested by Heckscher and Ohlin, but also by absolute factor endowments via a mechanism of competitive selection in the monopolistically competitive sector.     

FIXED COSTS,THE BALANCED BUDGET MULTIPLIER AND WELFARE*

In a two‐sector model, where one of the sectors is monopolistically competitive and subject to increasing returns to scale but without love for variety, we analyse the effects of a balanced budget fiscal expansion. Such an expansion could increase the welfare of the representative individual, if elasticities of substitution in production and consumption are low. A reorganization of production takes place—increasing returns enabling a rise in real income.     

Mobile capital and the home market effect

Abstract Most existing studies examine the home market effect (HME) in a framework with immobile labour as the only production factor and the assumption of a freely traded homogeneous good is known to be crucial for the HME to emerge. This study explores the HME in the presence of mobile capital by use of a footloose capital model allowing for positive transport costs of the homogeneous good. The mobile capital generates a channel to offset the trade imbalance of a country. As a result, the HME always appears for arbitrary transport costs in both sectors of differentiated and homogeneous goods.     

TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENTS AND TRADE LIBERALIZATION*

This paper examines the gains from cooperative agreements on transportation infrastructure investments when there are terms of trade and technological spillovers between countries. In a two ‐country model, cooperation on investment levels will result in a lower level of transport costs. However, the cooperative equilibrium may have a higher or lower level of infrastructure investment between the partner countries in the case of preferential liberalization. The paper also addresses the desirability of linking trade and infrastructure agreements when investment choices can be used strategically.     

MARKET TRANSACTION COSTS IN INDUSTRIALIZATION AND DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION*

Abstract. This paper presents a unified theory of growth involving human capital accumulation, labour specialization, market expansion and falling fertility rates. The model suggests that these processes, often analysed separately, are intimately linked. The accumulation of specialized human capital increases the gains to labour specialization, leading agents to increase their participation in markets and reduce time spent at home. This raises the opportunity cost of child raising, lowering fertility rates. The model suggests a central role for market transaction costs in determining the timing and rate of fertility declines linked to rising income.     

ENDOGENOUS MARKET STRUCTURES AND STRATEGIC TRADE POLICY*

I characterize the optimal export promoting policy for international markets whose structure is endogenous. Contrary to the ambiguous results of strategic trade policy for duopolies, it is always optimal to subsidize exports when entry is endogenous, under both quantity and price competition. With homogenous goods the optimal export subsidy is a fraction 1/ε of the price, where ε is the elasticity of demand (the exact opposite of the optimal export tax in the neoclassical trade theory). Analogously, I show the general optimality of R&D subsidies and of competitive devaluations to promote exports in foreign markets where entry is endogenous.     

INCREASING COSTS IN PRODUCT DIVERSIFICATION AND GAINS FROM TRADE*

The purpose of this paper is to extend a monopolistically competitive trade model with symmetric costs to one with asymmetric costs in product diversification. Both the trade pattern and the effects of the opening of trade on welfare are examined. It is shown that: (1)the larger country will be a net importer of differentiated products, which contradicts the result of Krugman (1980); (2)the greater the size of the country, the smaller is the share of the intra-industry trade, and (3)the larger the trading partner of a country, the larger are the gains from trade of the country. Some of these results duplicate those from recent studies. However, our results are based on asymmetric costs. In particular, (3) suggests that the presence of increasing-returns-to-scale technology does not always imply that the large country gains from its large market.     

HOME MARKET EFFECTS IN THE CHAMBERLINIAN–RICARDIAN WORLD

According to conventional home market effects, free trade tends to shrink the market share for a smaller economy in differentiated manufacturing goods, and in the extreme, leads to a complete hollowing out of the industry. Departing from the original Helpman–Krugman modelling assumptions behind the home market effects, we introduce a technology advantage in terms of the difference in fixed cost and/or marginal cost between trading partners and prove that home market effects will be offset and even reverse if a small economy has better technology than another country. With a higher elasticity of substitution, the marginal cost advantage becomes more important if it is to dominate the home market effect. We also show that even with an identical country size, the intra‐industry trade addressed in the existing literature may not occur; it will occur only if the technology differential lies within a certain range that is positively affected by the level of transport cost.     

FIRM HETEROGENEITY AND THE LABOR MARKET EFFECTS OF TRADE LIBERALIZATION*

This article develops a model that incorporates workers' fair wage preferences into a general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous firms. In a setting where the wage considered to be fair by workers depends on the productivity of the firm they are working in, we study the determinants of profits, involuntary unemployment and within‐group wage inequality. We use this model to investigate the effects of globalization, thereby pointing to distributional conflicts that have so far not been accounted for: a simultaneous increase of average profits and involuntary unemployment as well as a surge in within‐group wage inequality.     

Partial cross-ownership and strategic environmental policy

This paper analyzes the effect of passive investment in rival firms on the setting of cooperative and non-cooperative environmental taxes. We consider two firms located in different countries, with each firm owning the same percentage of the stock of its rival. We show that bilateral partial cross-ownership affects the taxes set by the countries in the cooperative and non-cooperative cases. When the stake that one firm has in its rival is great enough and environmental spillovers are low enough, cooperative taxes are lower than non-cooperative taxes. For the remaining values of parameters the opposite result is obtained.     

Why don't firms export more? Product quality and Colombian plants

Exporting firms around the world ship only a small fraction of their output overseas. For firms in a large country, such as the United States, this behavior can be explained by the existence of a large domestic market. For firms in a small lower income country, such as Colombia, the lower share of exports remains a puzzle. This paper begins by illustrating the failure of current models to explain plant export patterns in Colombia. Even models that do well in describing the US export distribution fail when confronted with the Colombian data. In response to this puzzle, this paper suggests that Colombia's export distribution can be explained with a two-dimensional productivity space where output productivity is considered separately from quality productivity. Predictions of this theory are tested on Colombian plant level data from 1981–1991. Overall, product quality is shown to be a significant factor in explaining the tendency for Colombian plants to under-export manufactured goods to the United States.     

本地市场效应:理论和经验研究的新近进展

本地市场效应是指,在一个存在报酬递增和贸易成本的世界中,那些拥有相对较大国内市场需求的国家将成为净出口国。它源自新古典贸易理论解释复杂贸易实践的理论局限和新贸易理论经验证据匮乏的困境,在探寻两种理论范式相对解释力的过程中应运而生,并随着空间经济学的迅猛崛起而成为新经济地理范式(New Economic Geography Paradigm)的核心特征之一。本文在回顾本地市场效应的理论背景和基本理论模型的基础上,对其理论模型和经验证据的新近发展作了系统的梳理并进行了简要的评论。     

PRIVATIZATION AND EFFICIENCY GAIN IN AN INTERNATIONAL MIXED OLIGOPOLY WITH ASYMMETRIC COSTS*

This paper examines two policy instruments, privatization of the domestic public firm and imposition of a tariff on foreign private firms in an international mixed oligopolistic model with asymmetric costs. It first demonstrates that different orders of moves of firms will imply different government decisions on optimal tariff and on privatization policy. Following Hamilton and Slutsky (1990 ), this paper then uses an extended game to discuss endogenous roles. It indicates that the efficiency gain that highlights the importance of foreign competition is crucial in determining the welfare improving privatization policy. Moreover, the endogenous equilibria are associated with different government decisions on privatization.     

DOMESTIC COMPETITION POLICY AND TARIFF POLICY COMPARED*

M. Yano and F. Dei have demonstrated that, by controlling the degree of competition in a non‐tradables market (competition policy), a country can influence the terms of trade so as to increase its welfare, relative to free trade. Using their model, this study compares the extent of this effect with that of a tariff policy. It demonstrates that a competition policy can achieve a higher utility than a tariff policy if tariff rates are at levels currently tolerated in the real world. This demonstrates that domestic competition policy may play an important role as a substitute for tariff policy.     

Productivity, exporting, and the learning-by-exporting hypothesis: direct evidence from UK firms

Abstract.  Case studies suggest exporters learn from clients. Econometric evidence is mixed. We use firm-level panel data on exporting and productivity with direct information on learning sources, including clients. We find: (a) firms who exported in the past are likely to learn more from clients (relative to other sources); (b) firms who learned from clients in the past are more likely to have faster productivity growth; (c) the reverse is not the case; that is, past productivity growth is not associated with more learning from clients and past learning from clients is not associated with more exporting. These results are consistent with the learning-by-exporting hypothesis.     

COMPETITION, PARALLEL IMPORTS AND COST-REDUCING INNOVATION

Incorporating parallel imports (PI), we develop a two‐country two‐firm model which relates to the incentives for cost‐reducing innovation. We show that PI may facilitate or inhibit the manufacturers' incentives to innovate. In particular, PI could encourage both firms' innovations. The difference between the manufacturer's profits under successful innovation and failed innovation is either a U‐shaped curve or an inverted U‐shaped curve in terms of the cost of engaging in PI. As these differences reflect the manufacturers' incentive to innovate, the variations in R&D investment depend on transportation cost, and firms' marginal costs before and after successful innovations.