There has been much debate recently about the nature of environmental policy that will be set by governments concerned about the competitive advantage their industries might obtain in a world of fierce trade competition. Some claim governments will set environmental policies that are too lax,...

Convergence in per capita income turns on whether technological knowledge spillovers are global or local. Global spillovers favour convergence, while a geographically limited scope of knowledge diffusion can lead to regional clusters of countries with persistently different levels of income per...

This paper develops a model to analyse the implications of firing costs on incentives for R&D and international specialization. The key idea is that, to avoid paying firing costs, the country with a rigid labour market will tend to produce relatively secure goods, at late stages in their product...

What is the impact of movement towards free trade on output? Can this impact permanently affect output levels, and more importantly, will it have an impact on steady-state growth rates? This paper provides empirical evidence showing how countries have exhibited substantial increases in their...

Convergence in per capita income across countries turns on whether technological knowledge spillovers are global or local in a large class of models. This Paper estimates the amount of spillovers from R&D expenditures in major industrialized countries on a geographic basis. A new data set is...

The theoretical literature on endogenous growth and international trade suggests that comparative advantage is endogenous. Sector-specific learning by doing and technology transfer respectively provide reasons why initial patterns of international specialization may persist or exhibit mobility...

We consider an endogenous growth model that includes international trade in capital goods. The model yields several distinct balanced growth solutions that can be classified using stability under adaptive learning. Some of the equilibria can involve growth rates much higher (or lower) than...

In this paper I analyse the incentives for governments and producers to act strategically in imperfectly competitive markets when there is Bertrand competition. Strategic behaviour by governments takes the form of distortions to their environmental policy from the first-best rule of equating...