There is strong empirical evidence that countries with lower per capita income tend to have smaller trade volumes even after controlling for aggregate income. Furthermore, poorer countries do not just trade less, but have a lower number of trading partners. In this paper, I construct and...

There is strong evidence suggesting that different income groups consume different bundles of goods. Hence, trade liberalization can affect welfare inequality via changes in the relative prices of goods consumed by different income groups (the price effect). In this paper, I develop a framework...

This paper explores how income distribution affects market structure, prices, and economic well-being of different consumer groups. I consider a general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition with free entry, heterogenous firms and consumers that share identical but non-homothetic...

This paper develops a novel approach to modeling preferences in monopolistic competition models with a continuum of goods. In contrast to the commonly used constant elasticity of substitution preferences, which do not capture the effects of consumer income and the intensity of competition on...

The virtual economy argument for Russia suggests that barter allows the parties to pretend that the manufacturing sector is producing value added by enabling this sector to sell its output at a higher price than its market value. We confront this prediction with the actual pricing behaviour of...

Recent theories of the multinational corporation introduce the property rights model of the firm and examine whether to integrate or outsource firm activities locally or to a foreign country. This paper focuses instead on the internal organization of the multinational corporation by examining...

This Policy Briefing examines how Europe’s corporations are changing the way they do business since the 2004 EU Enlargement. Dalia Marin argues that firms are adapting to heightening global competition by shifting decision-making processes. The author gives policy recommendations in the areas...

Countertrade consists of bilateral agreements (usually) between Western industrial enterprises and government agencies or state-owned enterprises in developing countries (LDCs) and centrally planned economies (CPEs), whereby sales of goods by the western exporter are linked contractually to the...

Starting with the international debt crisis in the 1980s, international barter increased substantially. More recently, barter has emerged in Russia and South East Asia. This paper examines how barter can help highly indebted countries to finance imports if they cannot use standard credit...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of countertrade based on 230 transactions whose details were collected from trading houses and firms involved in countertrade. Section 2 describes the data base and states the stylised facts of countertrade that need to be explained. Section 3 gives a...