This Paper discusses a number of issues in the context of the debate on intellectual property in less developed countries (LDCs). It starts by discussing the consequences of IP enforcement in LDCs for global innovation and welfare in poorer countries. It then considers the costs and benefits of...

Economic decisions such as occupational and entrepreneurial choices may violate true comparative advantage when economic agents are uncertain about which activity best matches their talents. If relative performance varies over the business cycle (for instance, if downturns affect...

We consider a model with a continuum of industries in which agglomeration forces cause each industry to concentrate in a single country. We study the division of industries between countries and show that this division is not unique, so that even with identical countries and symmetric industries...

This paper surveys the broad patterns of world trade in manufactures since about 1960. While the bulk of manufactured exports came initially from relatively few large industrial countries, developing countries have encroached seriously upon their markets in recent years. The newly industrialized...

This paper focuses on what the driving forces behind industry localisation in Europe are. Based on traditional as well as new trade theory and new economic geography our cross-sectoral empirical analysis seeks to explain the pattern of relative and absolute concentration of manufacturing...

This paper derives the conditions under which fitness-reducing alleles can survive in a long-run stationary equilibrium for a trading population, extending the results in Saint-Paul (2002) for arbitrary systems of sexual reproduction.

This paper uses a maintained hypothesis of comparative advantage based on relative factor endowments to investigate UK manufacturing trade prior to World War II. The results from several independent tests indicate that Britain exported goods intensive in the use of unskilled labour and had a...

Business cycles are both less volatile and more synchronized with the world cycle in rich countries than in poor ones. We develop two alternative explanations based on the idea that comparative advantage causes rich countries to specialize in industries that use new technologies operated by...

The growth of the Italian economy over the past 150 years since unification was accompanied by a dramatic increase in the country’s integration with European and global commodity markets: foreign trade in the long run grew on average faster than the overall economy. Behind the dynamics of...

We study the determinants of comparative advantage in polluting industries. We combine data on environmental policy at the country level with data on pollution intensity at the industry level to show that countries with laxer environmental regulation have a comparative advantage in polluting...