Carbon policy and the structure of global trade

Alternative perspectives on the structure of international trade have important implications for the evaluation of climate policy. In this paper, we assess climate policy in the context of three important alternative trade formulations. First is a Heckscher‐Ohlin model based on trade in homogeneous products, which establishes the traditional neoclassical view on comparative advantage. Second is an Armington model based on regionally differentiated goods, which is a popular specification for numerical simulations of trade policy. Third is a Melitz model based on monopolistic competition and firm heterogeneity. This heterogeneous‐firms framework is adopted in many contemporary theoretic and empirical investigations in international trade. As we show in this paper, the three alternative trade formulations have important implications for the assessment of climate policy with respect to competitive effects for energy‐intensive production (and hence carbon leakage) as well as the transmission of policy burdens across countries.     

中国对外贸易优势——基于国际分工视角的再研究

中国对外贸易优势的研究要么结合国际直接投资,要么分析中国出口贸易的RCA指标。本文从国际分工的视角出发,运用国际专业化指标,探讨了中国对外贸易的比较优势。发现中国对外贸易的比较优势主要集中在消费品领域,2004年,资本品领域开始具备了一定的比较优势。中国对外贸易的比较劣势主要集中在半成品以及零部件领域。通过国别研究,我们发现,中国对亚洲国家和地区的对外贸易中,半成品以及零部件领域具有较大的比较劣势。中国对外贸易比较优势形成的关键原因在于加工贸易的贸易政策、外商直接投资企业的作用日益显著以及中国融入了亚洲生产网络等。     

On Some Effects of International Fragmentation of Production on Comparative Advantages,Trade Flows and the Income of Countries

In traditional trade models, whether based on technological differences or on relative factor endowments, merchandise composition and directions of trade are derived from closed‐economy conditions. But nowadays one of the basic assumptions of traditional trade models, i.e. that production processes are integrated within just one country, is being increasingly violated as previously integrated productive activities are segmented and spread over an international network of production sites: as a result, an increasingly large share of trade flows is made up of intermediate and unfinished goods being transferred from one country to another in order to be processed. In this paper we submit that such new configuration of production processes has important effects on at least three dimensions of economic research. First, we show that international disintegration of production processes leads to a lessening of the power of comparative advantages when it comes to explaining both merchandise composition and directions of trade, while it is the concept of absolute advantage to become increasingly relevant; second, we show that empirical measures of revealed comparative advantages are inherently misleading if they do not account for differences in the stage‐of‐processing of traded goods; third, we estimate a simple model of aggregate demand accounting for international trade in intermediates: results of estimation lend support to our prior that participation of a country in the process of international fragmentation of production plays a specific and significant role in determining its year‐over‐year change in GDP.     

I.G. Farben in Japan: The Transfer of Technology and Managerial Skills

Before the Second World War, I.G. Farben, the giant German chemical firm, extended its operations to the Far East. It exported goods, licensed its technologies and made direct investments in Japan. Through these forms of international business activities, I.G. Farben transferred its production technology and managerial skills to the Japanese chemical industry. This article, using company archives, examines the background, motives, process and results of the transfer activities. It concludes that I.G. Farben exerted a significant influence on the production technology, marketing policy, and distribution system of the Japanese chemical industry.     

全球经济失衡与美国服务生产的贸易效应

本文从美国服务生产的贸易效应视角,探讨全球经济失衡中的逆差形成原因。以美国生产结构的变化为切入点,通过构建服务与商品两部门理论模型、统计分析与回归检验,讨论美国服务生产的贸易效应及其与收支失衡的关系。理论研究与模型分析证明,服务生产的非贸易品属性,使得美国经济在偏向于服务生产的产业结构调整中,形成了逆贸易倾向的增长方式。根据统计数据所做的实证分析显示,美国产业划分成生产与服务两部门时,在生产上存在着与理论分析相一致的逆贸易效应。在商品消费上,美国存在着商品边际进口倾向和商品进口需求收入弹性大于1的顺贸易效应。这两种相反的力量,会使出口增长速度低于进口增长速度,形成逆差。回归方程的计量检验发现,美国服务生产与美国商品贸易逆差之间存在因果关系,服务增长速度超过商品增长幅度时,商品贸易逆差增加。     

比较优势与我国服务贸易研究

比较优势理论是国际贸易中的一个重要理论，由于服务贸易与货物贸易不同，因此决定服务贸易的比较优势也有所不同。本分析了比较优势在服务贸易中的特点，存在的问题以及如何更好地将比较优势理论应用于我国服务贸易。     

WHY ARE GOODS CHEAPER IN RICH EUROPEAN COUNTRIES? BEYOND THE BALASSA–SAMUELSON EFFECT

In wealthy European countries consumer goods tend to be cheaper than consumer services. Usually explained in terms of cost developments and/or foreign‐trade considerations, this trend could also be a reflection of demand‐side regularities. Estimation of a cross‐country demand system indicates that goods are ‘necessities’ whereas services are ‘luxuries’. The relative price of goods responds negatively to the rising supply of goods and positively to the rising supply of services, with the former response being much stronger. If the supplies of both items were to rise at the same speed, the relative price of goods would have to fall.     

Industrial Specialization,Catching‐up and Labour Market Dynamics

This paper presents a dynamic model as a heuristic tool to discuss some issues of changing industrial specialization which arise in the context of catching‐up processes of (technologically) less advanced economies and the impact which various scenarios of such catching‐up processes might have on the labour market dynamics both in the advanced and in the catching‐up economies. In analysing the evolution of international specialization, we demonstrate the twin pressures exerted upon the industrial structures of “northern” economies: competition from “type‐A southern” economies, which maintain a comparative competitive strength in labour‐intensive and less skill‐intensive branches, and competition from “type‐B catching‐up” economies, whose catching‐up increasingly focuses upon branches in which the initial productivity gaps and hence the scope for catching‐up are the highest. The contrast between these two catching‐up scenarios allows the explicit analysis of the implications of “comparative advantage switchovers” between northern and southern (type B) economies for labour market dynamics.     

The Uses of Business History: A Contribution to the Discussion

This article relates the managerial enterprise (a firm in which decisions as to current production and distribution and allocation of resources for future production and distribution are made by salaried managers with little or no equity in the firms they operate in) to competitive success in the new capital-intensive industries that began to appear in the United States and Western Europe after the completion of modern transportation and communication networks. It begins by examining the reasons for the rapid rise of managerial firms in these industries, the global oligopolistic competition that ensued, and the organisational capabilities such competition engendered. It then reviews the competitive performance of such firms in global markets in chemicals, metals, electrical equipment, and heavy and light machinery in the early years of the century, motor vehicles in the inter-war years, and computers and semiconductors after World War II. These managerial firms grew by moving into foreign or related product markets. World War I, the Great Depression and World War II held back the full competitive impact of such growth until the 1960s. The response of US industrial firms to this intensive international, inter-industry competition of the 1960s brought unprecedented changes on the competitive capabilities of US managerial enterprises in such capital-intensive industries.     

国际分工对产业结构演进的影响及其对我国的启示——基于新兴工业化国家跨国面板数据的经验分析

从需求角度探讨了国际分工与产业结构演变的关系,提出国际分工主要通过直接效应和间接效应,以及由此衍生的收入效应、关联效应和替代效应来影响一国产业结构变化的理论假说。采用20世纪80年代陆续进入工业化成熟期的15个新兴工业化国家的跨国面板数据进行了实证检验,发现这些新兴工业化国家在产业结构向服务经济转型的同时,制造业的比较优势和外贸依存度却出现了下降趋势,国内最终消费占比呈现上升趋势。其经济含义表明:新兴工业化国家如果过度强化在国际分工中的制造国地位,长期依靠商品贸易来拉动经济增长,可能阻碍产业结构由工业经济向服务经济的转型;而随着制造业比较优势的下降,如果减少对商品贸易的依赖,更多地依靠国内需求来发展经济,对于产业结构的转型将有正面的促进作用。以上结论对于我国经济结构的调整具有重要的借鉴意义。     

Comparative Advantage and the Gains from Financial Trade: A Reappraisal

Emerging market crises have suggested that a national benefit‐cost assessment of external financial liberalisation could well prove unfavourable. This paper re‐examines the principle of comparative advantage in its application to financial trade to seek guidance on measures that might permit a fuller realisation of the potential benefits involved. Drawing a parallel with Balasubramanyam's work on the gains from FDI and international migration we distinguish between those arising in financial trade from the net transfer of capital, and those deriving from the contemporaneous exchange of financial claims or services of equivalent value. In the first interpretation a country's comparative advantage is manifested by its role in ‘intertemporal’ trade (as a borrower or lender). Our alternative emphasis is on the contractual risk‐return characteristics of the financial claims exchanged. This perspective is applied firstly to portfolio diversification gains arising from further international stock market integration. Secondly, price risk management for developing countries in international primary commodity trade is discussed. Both applications imply the need for significant institutional development but could realise approximately contemporaneous gains reminiscent both of those involved in merchandise trade and in the skills and product (or service) flows that Balasubramanyam has emphasised in relation to FDI and international migration.     

加工贸易贫困化增长的黑箱：对中国贸易条件不断恶化的一种试探性解释

中国30年改革开放取得的巨大成就很大程度上依赖于中国发挥比较优势参与国际经济。中国发挥比较优势战略的重要手段就是鼓励加工贸易发展,而加工贸易发展则引起巨额经常项目差额,通过影响世界相对供需及汇率来作用于贸易条件,带来了贫困化增长威胁。对于加工贸易发展导致贫困化增长的中间作用机制分析表明,只要实行劳动密集型比较优势战略就必然会引起一定条件下贸易条件的恶化。本文的主要贡献在于从理论上解释了加工贸易贫困化增长的黑箱,同时得到实证检验支持。     

我国玉米主要加工品的国际竞争力分析

近10年来,我国玉米加工业发展迅速。本文综合运用国际市场占有率(MS)、贸易竞争力指数(TC)和显示性比较优势指数(RCA)等指标分别从市场份额、净出口状况和出口规模等角度对我国玉米主要加工品的国际竞争力进行了实证分析。研究表明,我国玉米的主要加工品整体上具有较强的竞争优势,而且近几年呈现出上升的趋势,但各种主要玉米加工品的竞争优势有很大差别,其中玉米淀粉表现出了极强的竞争优势,玉米油的竞争优势较强,而玉米面的竞争优势较弱。     

Tariff wars in the Ricardian Model with a continuum of goods

This paper describes strategic tariff choices within the Ricardian framework of Dornbusch, Fischer, and Samuelson (1977) using CES preferences. The optimum tariff schedule is uniform across goods and inversely related to the import demand elasticity of the other country. In the Nash equilibrium of tariffs, larger economies apply higher tariff rates. Productivity adjusted relative size (≈ GDP ratio) is a sufficient statistic for absolute productivity advantage and the size of the labor force. Both countries apply higher tariff rates if specialization gains from comparative advantage are high and transportation cost is low. A sufficiently large economy prefers the inefficient Nash equilibrium in tariffs over free trade due to its quasi-monopolistic power on world markets. The required threshold size is increasing in comparative advantage and decreasing in transportation cost. I discuss the implications of the static Nash-equilibrium analysis for the sustainability and structure of trade agreements.     

战后国际经济协调理论与实践评析

作为国际经济关系中的重要现象,国际经济协调始终在战后世界经济的运行中扮演着重要的角色。本文从概念、西方研究概况、必要性、方式等角度,对国际经济协调进行了理论分析,并且按照历史的纬度将二战后国际经济协调的实践划分为三个阶段,归纳了各阶段国际经济协调实践呈现出的不同特点。     

战后日本的宏观经济特质——基于历史的回顾

文章按时间序列将二战后日本的经济发展过程划分为四个阶段,分别概括了每个阶段经济发展的结构性特征、模式、动力、机制和主要问题,并试图找出每个阶段发展所依据的理论基础。文章认为战后日本经济发展所取得的巨大成就,与日本建立起适应产业资本主义逻辑的独特的经济系统有密切关系;而泡沫经济破灭后日本所经历的长达20年的经济萧条和徘徊,在某种意义上归结于日本的经济系统同金融资本主义的矛盾与冲突。或许日本已经到了重新定义经济、创新整个经济系统的历史的转折点上。     

Borders Redrawn: Measuring the Statistical Creation of International Trade

In this note, we quantify how much of the increase in the volume of international trade that took place since 1945 is attributed to the reclassification of within‐country trade to international trade owing to changes in national boundaries. We do so by imposing the territorial delimitations corresponding to 1946 to the current trade flow data, thus quantifying the volume of international trade that would not have been labelled international given national boundaries right after the end of World War II. Our results show that the effect of ‘boundary redrawing’ corresponds roughly to 1 per cent of the total volume of international trade. If colonial trade had been statistically considered to be within‐country (within‐empire) trade instead of international trade, the independence of colonies would have raised this effect to approximately 3 per cent of total trade.     

Modelling the Impact of Environmental Regulations on Bilateral Trade Flows: OECD, 1990–1996

Since the early seventies an increasing attention has been paid to the impact environmental polict nmight have on foreign trade. One of the most important issues is whether countries with relatively strict environmental regulations tend to experience a deterioration of international competitiveness and thus a fall in exports and a rise in imports, of the pollution‐intensive commodities or, on the other hand, benefit from the improvement in environmentally more sensitive industries. So far, most empirical studies have concluded that the proportion of environmental costs to the total production costs is still so marginal that environmental policies have hardly any effect on comparative advantage patterns and thus on foreign trade. One of the few exceptions is Van Beers and Van den Bergh (1997), who found that stricter regulations have some negative impact on bilateral trade flows between OECD countries. The aim of this paper is to show that tyhis outcome is partly due to model mis‐specification. The analysis id based on a triple indexed model and on its variants. It is found that, as soon as both the importing and exporting country specific effects are taken into consideration, the relationship between stricter regulations and foreign trade becomes statistically insignificant. This suggests that environmental costs do not have a real impact, neither negative nor positive, on foreign trade.     

The International Monetary Fund Continues to Develop New Products to Facilitate 'High Quality' Growth:

Multilateral public sector institutions created in the latter days of the Second World War or early in the ''Cold War'' are experiencing considerable pressure as various stakeholders question their relevance amidst a vastly changed global environment. This paper examines one such organization--the International Monetary Fund--whose active pursuit of new product development during 1986-94 has resulted in a significant repositioning for the IMF. Lessons of this strategy are drawn for both international marketing executives and managers of other public sector institutions.     

More than window dressing: visual merchandising and austerity in London’s West End, 1945–50

Abstract

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the fashion departments of London’s West End department stores were not only challenged by austerity and bomb damage but also by the growth of multiple retailers selling branded ready-to-wear goods. This article investigates how department stores responded by investing in display and visual merchandising to attract custom and rebuild their fashionable reputations. It argues that the difficulties caused by austerity conditions forced department stores to embrace new retail methodologies that helped them adapt to the changed circumstances of post-war fashion retail and compete with multiple retailers.