This paper evaluates the global welfare impact of ChinaÕs trade integration and technological change in a quantitative Ricardian-Heckscher-Ohlin model implemented on 75 countries. We simulate two alternative productivity growth scenarios: a ÒbalancedÓ one in which ChinaÕs productivity grows...

A half-century of empirical work on the factor proportions theory has but has failed to devise simple amendments that bring theory and data into reasonable congruence. Our study considers standard and novel hypotheses regarding the failures of the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek formulation and is the...

There are two principal theories of why countries trade: comparative advantage and increasing returns to scale. Yet there is no empirical work that assesses the relative importance of these two theories in accounting for production structure and trade. We use a framework that nests an increasing...

This paper examines the implications of the Heckscher-Ohlin (HO) Model for the patterns of production and trade that will emerge as a country grows. It focuses primarily on world equilibria that include two or more cones of diversification. Starting with the textbook model of two factors and two...

his paper examines the effects of fragmentation across cones of diversification in the Heckscher-Ohlin model of international trade. Fragmentation is defined as the splitting of production processes into parts that can be done in different countries. Such fragmentation may occur in a world of...

This paper first notes the importance of "one-cone" versus "multi-cones"equilibria in the Heckscher-Ohlin Model of international trade, then asks whether the process of economic growth as modeled in neoclassical growth models tends to lead the world more toward one or the other. The one-cone...

This paper is the text of a lecture given on November 20, 1997 to inaugurate the John W. Sweetland Chair in International Economics, in the Department of Economics of the University of Michigan. Its message is that international trade theory, and in particular the theory of comparative...

A test of the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek [HOV] hypothesis for the cases when factor price equalization does not hold is developed. For all the possible country pairs of the BLS (1987) and Trefler (1995) data set, I test whether trade reveals the relative factor abundance of one country compared to...

A neoclassical growth model is used to provide an explanation for a "poverty trap," or "club convergence," in terms of specialization and international trade. The model has a large number of countries with access to identical constant-returns-to-scale technologies for producing and trading three...