Vertical specialization in the EU and the causality of trade

We use a novel classification scheme to identify three stages of production in the manufacturing sector: parts, components and final goods. In particular, we offer evidence on the revealed comparative advantage of the EU-27 countries concerning the three vertically separated stages of production. Moreover, we investigate whether, and if so how, imports of parts, and components can work as a predictor for the exports of final goods. We find that countries specialize at different stages of production, and that components are Granger causal for the export of final goods in many countries with a lag of 3 months.     

Fragmentation, Engel's Law, and Learning

This paper outlines the conditions under which trade is beneficial for a developing country's growth. A developing country suffers from two disadvantages: low income and a comparative disadvantage in the production of modern manufactured goods—goods which allow a high rate of human capital accumulation through learning by doing. Low income together with Engel's law imply that developing countries consume and produce very few modern goods in autarky and hence grow slowly. With international fragmentation of production, a developing country may find comparative advantage in the production of some stages of modern goods despite an absence of comparative advantage in the production of modern goods under “100% local content.” More resources can then be allocated to the modern goods sector leading to greater learning externalities and hence growth under free trade than in autarky.     

Sustained Comparative Advantage and Semi-Endogenous Growth

This paper constructs a two-country (Home and Foreign) general-equilibrium model of Schumpeterian growth without scale effects. The scale effects property is removed by introducing a distinct specification in the knowledge production function which generates semi-endogenous growth. In this model of semi-endogenous growth, an increase in the rate of population growth rate raises Home's relative wage and lowers its range of goods exported to Foreign. An increase in the size of innovations increases Home's relative wage but with an ambiguous effect on its comparative advantage. The model generates a unique steady-state equilibrium in which there is complete specialization in both goods and R&D production within each country.     

Gender Inequality and Trade*

The paper empirically explores the international linkages between gender inequality and trade flows of a sample of 92 developed and developing countries. The focus is on comparative advantage in labor‐intensive manufactured goods. The results indicate that gender wage inequality is positively associated with comparative advantage in labor‐intensive goods, i.e. countries with a larger gender wage gap have higher exports of these goods. Also, gender inequality in labor force activity rates and educational attainment rates are negatively linked with comparative advantage in labor‐intensive commodities.     

Peak globalization: Climate change, oil depletion and global trade

The global trade in goods depends upon reliable, inexpensive transportation of freight along complex and long-distance supply chains. Global warming and peak oil undermine globalization by their effects on both transportation costs and the reliable movement of freight. Countering the current geographic pattern of comparative advantage with higher transportation costs, climate change and peak oil will thus result in peak globalization, after which the volume of exports will decline as measured by ton-miles of freight. Policies designed to mitigate climate change and peak oil are very unlikely to change this result due to their late implementation, contradictory effects and insufficient magnitude. The implication is that supply chains will become shorter for most products and that production of goods will be located closer to where they are consumed.     

A generalized impure public good and linear characteristics model of green consumption

This paper provides a general framework for understanding consumer behavior related to goods and services that may be considered environmentally friendly, ethically produced, fairly traded, or some combination thereof. We generalize the impure public good model and derive its comparative static properties. The model accounts for any number of impure public (green) goods and joint production of any number of both private and public characteristics. The generalization provides a bridge between the impure public good model and the well-known linear characteristics model, both of which are special cases of the model developed here. The results show how demand for green goods and characteristics such as environmental quality depends on wealth, exogenously given levels of public goods, and the technologies of joint production. The effects of changes in technology depend critically on whether jointly produced characteristics are complements or substitutes in consumption. Several of the results are rather counterintuitive and differ in meaningful ways from existing models of impure public goods and linear characteristics. The results also illuminate several reasons for greater caution about whether it is reasonable to assume that green goods and services are necessarily beneficial for the provision of public goods.     

Motivation for bilateral aid allocation: Altruism or trade benefits

This paper argues that OECD countries allocate more aid to recipient nations who import goods in which donor nations have a comparative advantage in production. The estimates indicate that a substantially larger amount of aid is provided to recipients who import capital goods, while imports by other category groups have no significant effects. Given that developed donor nations are major producers and exporters of capital goods, this result at least partially supports their trade benefits motive. Donors also appear to be more concerned about alleviating physical miseries (infant mortality) and rewarding good human rights conditions, but less towards reducing economic hardships (poverty). Moreover, the usual political and strategic considerations of donors continue to be the major determinants of aid allocation even in the Post Cold War era.     

Optimizing production technology choices: conventional production vs. recycling

The present study examines the optimal use of renewable resources and how optimality is linked to the accumulation of waste stock. Production technology choices are based on a maximization of a discounted stream of net utility over time with respect to constancy of environmental services. When adopting a socially optimal tax-subsidy scheme to price produced goods, the ultimate utility level is determined by how tax revenues and subsidies compensate each other in monetary terms. Therefore, the constraints imposed on the optimal use of economic instruments in promoting recycling when a government budget is balanced are also studied. The materials balance structure of the model yields steady-state comparative statics and dynamic envelope results with interesting policy implications.     

Environmental Policies, Comparative Advantage and the Gains/Losses from International Trade

A multihousehold economy with multilateral nondepletable externalities, environmental (output) taxation and governmental production of pure, nonexclusive and nonrivalrous public goods is assumed. Modelling many different households the "almost perfect" isomorphism between the normative analysis of public goods and environmental policies is highlighted. Globally valid necessary and sufficient conditions for gains from international trade are derived and interpreted. A simple yet general environmental policy rule ensuring trade gains is put forward. The law of comparative advantage is generalized to economies with multilateral nondepletable externalities and over or underproduced pure public goods.     

Economic Takeoffs in a Dynamic Process of Globalization*

The paper develops a dynamic general‐equilibrium framework to illustrate that trade liberalization may speed up the process of globalization and industrialization by enabling a small open economy to reallocate production factors to modern export sectors where increasing returns to experience are present. The authors emphasize the role of knowledge in service activities related to the export of modern sector goods, which has the form of a public good that can be utilized in exporting of other modern sector goods. As a consequence of this knowledge accumulation, the economy begins to take off and exhibits more rapid rates of wage and output growth. The accumulation of knowledge also shifts comparative advantage in the modern sector to more service‐intensive goods, thus leading to a natural evolution of comparative advantage. These results lend theoretical support to the different development experiences in the 1960s between East Asia and Latin America.     

Trade in goods and services: Two sides of the same coin?

This study analyzes the interrelationship between goods and services in production and trade using the most recent input–output tables for all OECD countries. It first describes the role of services in production and trade in goods. Next, it proposes two models for analyzing the impact of services trade liberalization on industrial structure. The first captures the role of trade in tasks when countries have different technology i) in production of services; and ii) in organizing production. The latter has to the author's knowledge not been analyzed in the trade literature before. Countries with superior organizational technology (e.g. Japan) will strengthen their comparative advantage in manufacturing following trade liberalization in services. The second model explores the interrelationship between intermediate goods and services i) when they are substitutes; and ii) when they are complements. In both models the gains from trade liberalization is non-linear in trade costs. Going the last mile of liberalization has a much larger impact than taking the first steps.     

How China is Reorganizing the World Economy*

We analyze the impact of China's integration into the global economy on other countries, Asian countries in particular. We first examine how the growth of China's exports is affecting the exports of other countries in Asia and the rest of the world. Our innovation is to distinguish exports of capital goods, consumer goods, and intermediates and to disaggregate textiles and consumer electronics, the most visible sectors where China's presence is felt. We next look to the impact of China on direct foreign investment flows. Here our innovation is to distinguish vertical and horizontal foreign direct investment (FDI) and to consider how they are affected by supply‐chain relationships. We then look more closely at factors influencing the articulation of these supply chains, the fragmentation of production, and the emerging international division of labor, focusing on two industries, electronics and autos, that exhibit very different responses. The results suggest that countries specializing in the production and export of components and raw materials feel positive effects from China's growth, while countries specializing in the production of consumer goods feel negative effects. Similarly, countries that compete with China for horizontal FDI find it more difficult to attract foreign investment as a result of that country's emergence, while countries that are potentially attractive destinations for vertical FDI find it easier to attract foreign investment as a result of trade links, especially in components and intermediates, that allow them to take advantage of supply chains involving their large and dynamically growing neighbor.     

The Voluntary (Private) Production of Public Goods,the Gains From Trade,and Comparative Advantage*

Any (finite) number of privately produced public goods are incorporated into a general trade-theory model of private goods and factors. Postulating Cournot-Nash behavior, a necessary condition for gainful trade is derived. Potential trade gains are related to the law of comparative advantage in private goods and the change in the underproduction of public goods. A sufficient condition is also proven. Trade gains/losses are compared for more or less populous economies. All the results have analogues in the literature on imperfect competition and/or increasing returns to scale.     

外商直接投资、知识产权保护与发展中国家的社会福利--兼论发展中国家的引资战略

本文在一个由发达国家企业和发展中国家企业所构成的寡头垄断的产量竞争模型中 ,考察了在发达国家企业所进行的产品创新型R&D投资具有溢出效应的情况下 ,发达国家企业对发展中国家的外商直接投资 (FDI)所产生的福利效果。本文发现 ,即使发展中国家拥有生产成本相对低廉的优势 ,发达国家企业对发展中国家的FDI也只有在溢出效应较小时才可能发生。但这种情况下的FDI也可能损害发展中国家的同类竞争企业 ,甚至损害发展中国家的社会福利。当然 ,以上结论并不意味着引进外资必然损害发展中国家的利益 ,外资引进对发展中国家所产生的福利效果 ,在很大程度上取决于FDI的性质 (产品市场的所在国 )、发展中国家成本优势的大小以及它对知识产权的保护力度等因素。     

Trade policy in a Ricardian model with a continuum of goods under nonhomothetic preferences

We study the effects of trade liberalization in a Ricardian trade model with a continuum of goods and nonhomothetic preferences. Goods are ordered according to priority, and higher-ranked goods are consumed only by richer households. South (North) has a comparative advantage in the lower- (higher-) ranked goods. South's terms-of-trade unambiguously deteriorate as a result of unilaterally reducing its tariffs. North, by contrast, may experience a terms-of-trade gain when liberalizing its trade. It appears that the redistribution of tariff revenue from rich to poor households within each country increases the burden of trade liberalization for poor households.     

Hotelling and recycling

We study the exploitation of recyclable exhaustible resources such as metals that are crucial for the energy transition or phosphorus that is crucial for agricultural production. We use a standard Hotelling model of resource exploitation that includes a primary sector and a recycling sector. We study two polar cases: competitive and monopolistic extraction. We show that, when the primary sector is competitive, the Hotelling’s rule holds and the price of the recyclable resource increases over time. We then show a new reason why the price of an exhaustible resource may decrease: when the primary sector is monopolistic, the primary producer has incentives to delay its production activities in order to delay recycling. As a consequence, the price path of the recyclable resource may be U-shaped. Numerical simulations reveal that the monopolist has an incentive to delay extraction when the recoverability rate is high (because more recycled goods are produced) or when the recoverability rate is low (when fewer recycled goods are expected to be produced in the future). As a consequence, the date of exhaustion of the virgin resource is further away in time for high and low levels of recoverability than for intermediate levels.     

外部性与重工业优先发展

In the framework of a dynamic general equilibrium model, this paper studies how vertical externalities affect the development of heavy industry in a developing economy. The model is comprised of an intermediate and a consumer product sector. The production of both types of goods has pecuniary externalities as they are featured by increasing return to scale. However, the production of an intermediate product has an additional advantage to have externalities through its technological linkage with the production of consumer goods. This is related to the nature of the roundabout production of consumer goods: a larger number of intermediate products lead to higher productivity in the production of consumer goods than do more inputs of a fixed number of intermediate products. Therefore, private investment in the intermediate sector is below the social optimal level. Government subsidies can restore the economy to the social optimum, but they become less needed as the consumer sector grows larger and the advantage of the intermediate good sector diminishes. __________ Translated from Nankai Jingji Yanjiu 南开经济研究 (Nankai Economic Studies), 2007, (2): 3–19     

All-pay war

We study a model of conflicts and wars in which the outcome is uncertain not because of luck on the battlefield as in standard models, but because countries lack information about their opponent. In this model expected resource levels and production and military technologies are common knowledge, but realized resource levels are private information. Each country decides how to allocate its resources to production and warfare. The country with the stronger military wins and receives aggregate production. In equilibrium both comparative and absolute advantages matter: a larger resource share is allocated to warfare by the country with a comparative advantage in warfare at relatively low realized resource levels, and by the country with an absolute disadvantage in warfare at relatively high realized resource levels. From an ex-ante perspective the country with a comparative advantage in warfare is more likely to win the war unless its military potential is much lower.     

Asymmetric trade protection leading not to productivity but to export share change

This article revisits a classical theme in economics, that is, the relationship between trade protection and economic performance, with an improved treatment of the endogeneity of tariffs and with consideration of alternative performance criteria. This paper also considers the effects of asymmetric protection, such as higher tariffs on consumer goods and lower tariffs on producer goods. Using sectoral data on Korean manufacturing during the period from 1967 to 1993, this study finds that the effect of trade protection by tariff tends to show up not in terms of total factor productivity but in terms of revealed comparative advantage and export shares of sectors. Such an effect tends to be greater in consumer goods, which are the main targets of promotion by higher tariffs. This study verifies the potentially positive role of tariffs under certain conditions, especially under discipline from world markets.     

Skilled Labour and International Specialisation in OECD Countries

Human capital and skilled labour are likely to become increasingly important determinants of industrial localisation. This paper calculates the factor content—the services of skilled labour, classified by level of education, embodied in trade in manufactures—for a sample of OECD countries in 1970–85. USA and Japan show a strong ‘revealed comparative advantage’ in human capital intensive production. In general, OECD countries where highly educated labour is abundant tend to specialise in and export skill intensive goods. Changes in the ranking with respect to specialisation in skill intensive goods, in particular the strong improvement of Japans' position, seem to be linked to different rates of accumulation of human capital.