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.     

International Trade with a Public Intermediate Good and the Gains from Trade*

This paper presents a one‐primary factor, two‐consumer good, and two‐country model of international trade where each country’s government supplies a country‐specific public intermediate good so as to attain efficient production. By introducing the Marshallian adjustment process, it is demonstrated that the country with larger factor endowment exports the good whose productivity is more sensitive to the public intermediate good. Our normative analysis of free trade shows the following results. First, at least one country gains from trade. Secondly, if a country incompletely specializes in the trading equilibrium, the country necessarily loses from trade.     

全球公共产品与多边贸易体制改革

全球化的发展使得公共产品的提供超出了民族国家的管辖范畴,以多边协调机制为基础的全球公共产品供应体制随之产生。以GATT/WTO为核心的多边贸易体制提供了与贸易有关的全球公共产品。然而多边贸易体制在全球公共产品的供应中,存在着供给与需求不符、成员受益不均、供应机制缺乏民主等问题。多边贸易体制改革应以发展为导向,保障发展中国家的权利,满足发展中国家对全球公共产品的需求。     

Trade Gains in Chaotic Equilibria

It is shown by means of an overlapping-generations (OLG) example that free international trade may be both deterministically chaotic and gainful in the sense of Pareto to a participating country.     

Shared Renewable Resources: Gains from Trade and Trade Policy

This paper examines the effects of international trade and trade policy in a two‐country, two‐good model with an open‐access renewable resource that is internationally shared. We show that both countries may still benefit from trade when they specialize in the production of their comparative advantage good, although the shared resource is reduced by trade. In addition, we demonstrate that the steady state utility of a resource‐good importing country may be reduced by trade, even if it specializes in the production of a non‐resource good. Import tariffs and export taxes on a resource good may increase or decrease the shared stock level depending on the production patterns in a trading steady state. The trade policy is likely to be Pareto‐improving when the shared stock rises, while both countries may be made worse off by the trade policy when the shared stock falls.     

Gains from Trade with Lump-sum Compensation

This paper analyses the use of lump-sum compensation to ensure a Pareto improvement under free trade. It first shows how households, which are aware of the free-trade and compensation policy, may falsify autarkic consumption to get larger transfers. Despite consumption falsification, however, trade could still be gainful using lump-sum compensation under certain conditions. This paper also suggests a case in which an incentive-compatible lump-sum compensation scheme exists.     

服务贸易壁垒与货物贸易壁垒的比较

20世纪90年代以来,服务业已成为全球经济增长最快的部门,全球经济竞争的重点正从货物贸易转向服务贸易。近年货物贸易频频遭遇的技术壁垒已经成了我国发展国际贸易的瓶颈,分析货物贸易壁垒与服务贸易壁垒的规律、异同和应对其的成本和措施,对制定国家贸易战略有着重要的现实意义。     

The Gains from Trade and Policy Reform Revisited

The primary purpose of the paper is to provide characterizations of the conditions for welfare improvements in several situations that have received very little attention in the existing literature. The first aim is to exhibit the gains that can accrue to a country from the elimination of excess supplies as a result of a policy move from autarky to free trade. The second aim is to characterize the conditions under which the introduction of new goods into the economy will generate welfare gains. The third main area discussed is the extension of the authors’ methodology to a large open economy that can influence its terms of trade. The techniques used to illustrate the gains from eliminating excess supplies and from the introduction of new goods have a much wider applicability; they may be used to obtain and synthesize several welfare results from the literature.     

Comparative Advantage With and Without Gains from Trade

In 1980, Deardorff, and Dixit and Norman, generalized the law of comparative advantage to show that the value of net imports at autarky prices (or "DDN index") is nonnegative, so that net imports are correlated with autarky prices. The DDN index can be decomposed into the sum of (i) the equivalent variation of gains from trade, and (ii) the difference in GNP at autarky prices between autarky and trade. Several examples are given of classical and neoclassical economies where (i) or (ii) can be zero. Hence gains from trade are sufficient but not necessary for the existence of comparative advantage.     

Strategic R&D Commitment and the Gains from Trade

This paper examines how trade liberalization affects innovation, profits and welfare in a model of reciprocal markets when firms pre‐commit to research and development (R&D). We establish that the equilibrium is not always unique and show that, with trade, R&D commitment leads to higher levels of innovation, lower profits, higher consumer surplus and higher welfare than when R&D is chosen simultaneously to output levels. Furthermore, if the effectiveness of R&D is sufficiently high, trade always yields higher welfare than autarky, implying that R&D commitment may significantly enhance the welfare gains from trade liberalization.     

The Gain from International Trade in Pool Goods and Private Goods

It is well known that perfectly competitive free trade is potentially beneficial for all countries if all goods are both rivalrous and excludable in consumption (“private goods”) and recently (2011) the proposition has been modified to accommodate non‐rivalrous and non‐excludable goods (“public goods”), as well as non‐rivalrous and excludable goods (“club goods”). In the present paper the proposition is modified again, to accommodate rivalrous and non‐excludable goods (“pool goods”). The primary focus is on ocean fisheries, access to which is shared (not necessarily equally) by all countries. However the central proposition to be established is valid for all international pool goods.     

Trade and Gains from Trade Between Profit-maximizing and Labour-managed Countries with Imperfect Competition

This paper offers a theoretical analysis of trade and the gains from trade in general equilibrium under imperfect competition by assuming that all firms in one country are of the labour-managed type (maximizing the income of labour) while those in the other country are of the profit-maximizing type. Our main conclusion is that if the labour-managed country is larger than or equal to the profit-maximizing country, the profit-maximizing country exports the imperfectly competitive commodity and gains from trade while the labour-managed country exports the perfectly competitive commodity and may lose from trade.     

Threatened Species as Public Goods and Public Bads

This paper discusses Pareto efficient allocations of an environmental commodity, which is both a public good and a public bad, with an application to the Scandinavian problem of conserving wild predators that are killing semi-domesticated reindeer. The paper begins by briefly outlining this conflict. This is followed by a theoretical analysis employing a diagrammatic tool called the Kolm triangle, which is an analogue of an Edgeworth box in an economy with a public good. Bargaining, Pareto improving reallocations and the shape of the Pareto set are discussed, using a simple model, where one of the agents is involountarily contributing to a public good. The paper concludes with an analysis of income-loss compensations and incentives for illegal hunting of predators.     

Bargaining over Public Goods

In a simple public good economy, we propose a natural bargaining procedure, the equilibria of which converge to Lindahl allocations as the cost of bargaining vanishes. The procedure splits the decision over the allocation in a decision about personalized prices and a decision about output levels for the public good. Since this procedure does not assume price-taking behavior, it provides a strategic foundation for the personalized taxes inherent in the Lindahl solution to the public goods problem.     

Trade in Used Goods and Durability Choice

This paper studies the issue of durability choice when there are heterogeneous groups of consumers in the market. The possibility of trade between consumers and its effects on durability choice are examined. It is shown that neither a competitive nor a monopolistic market realizes the social optimum globally. Swan's “independence result” does not hold, in general. [020]     

Decentralizing Public Goods Production

Decentralized decisions, to a bureau with a given budget, about the production of public goods is analyzed within a general equilibrium model with a representative agent and no pure profits. Contrary to previous results on decentralization it is shown that sequential decentralization (i) does not necessarily imply aggregate production efficiency and (ii) need not be optimal even if all public goods are neutral. Also, cost‐benefit criteria are derived and the marginal cost of public funds is characterized.     

Marshall's Scissors: The Gains and Losses from Trade

In a Ricardian two‐factor endowment model with Cobb–Douglas tastes and many goods, this paper describesthe interaction of the demand and supply sides to determine the gains and losses from trade. If the abundant factor has a sufficiently rich profile of comparative advantages, trade causesthe proportionate gain to the abundant factor to be smaller than the proportionate loss to the scarce factor. However, if the abundant factor has sufficiently skewed comparative advantages toward the best goods, then the opposite will hold. Some examples suggest that these patterns may have something to do with the selection of trade regimes. In the usual one‐factor Ricardian model the gains from trade to a country are enhanced by higher demand shares for imports, but such gains from trade from imports to a country is not the case in a factor endowment model.     

International Economies of Scale and the Gains from Trade

In this paper, we present a two-country trade model with external economies of scale that emerge on an international level but are partially localized in each country. First, we show that the larger country exports the good produced in an industry with external economies of scale in the trading equilibrium. Second, we investigate the welfare effects of trade for the following two cases: (I) the case where external economies are completely localized in autarky; (II) the case where external economies are internationally effective in autarky. In case (II), it is shown that trade can be welfare-decreasing for both countries.     

Strategic Environmental Policies and the Gains from Trade Liberalization

The literature on strategic environmental policy has not fully addressed welfare effects of trade liberalization from autarky. In a reciprocal market model of duopoly with transboundary pollution, we study how reductions in transport costs and import tariffs affect the Nash‐equilibrium welfare of an environmental policy game as compared to any initial state including autarky. We show three patterns of gainfulness of trade depending on the interaction between marginal damage from pollution and the degree of transboundary pollution.     

作为公共品的组织

组织是一种特别的公共品。如果能够使不同成员的边际贡献与他们从组织中得到的边际收益相等,那么组织就实现了均衡。由于成员的边际贡献难以测度,因此只有通过实施“一报还一报”的策略才能激励成员实现组织的共容利益。