This paper studies the trade of China in the past 150 years, starting from the first opening of China after the Opium War. The main purpose of the paper is to identify what is (and was) China's 'normal' level of foreign trade, and how these levels changed under different trade regimes, from 1840...

Rosenstein-Rodan (1943) and others posit that rapid development requires a 'big push' -- the coordinated rapid growth of diverse complementary industries, and suggests a role for government in providing such coordination. We argue that Japan's zaibatsu, or pyramidal business groups, provided...

This paper presents empirical evidence that the growth of export manufacturing in Mexico during a period of major trade reforms, the years 1986-2000, altered the distribution of education. I use variation in the timing of factory openings across municipalities to show that school dropout...

This paper presents a tractable formalization and an empirical investigation of the quality-complementarity hypothesis, the hypothesis that input quality and plant productivity are complementary in generating output quality. We embed this complementarity in a general-equilibrium trade model with...

Empirical work relating trade liberalization and income distributed has iden- tified an important anomaly. The Stolper-Samuelson theorem predict trade liberalization will shift income toward a country's abundant factor. For developing countries, this suggests liberalization will principally...

Despite the rapid expansion of U.S.-China trade ties, the increase in U.S. FDI in China, and the expanding amount of economic research exploring these developments, a number of misconceptions distort the popular understanding of U.S. multinationals in China. In this paper, we seek to correct...

As China has become an increasingly important part of the global trading system over the past two decades, interest in the country and its international economic policies has increased among international economists who are not China specialists. This paper represents an attempt to provide the...

Each of the world's largest retailers---Walmart, Carrefour, Tesco, and Metro---entered China after 1995. Their subsequent expansion in China may have influenced Chinese exports through two channels. First, they may have enhanced bilateral exports between the retailers' Chinese operations and...

Global climate change mitigation will require the development and diffusion of a large number and variety of new technologies. How will patent protection affect this process? In this paper we first review the evidence on the role of patents for innovation and international technology transfer in...

We explore the relation between international financial integration and the level of entrepreneurial activity in a country. We use a unique firm level data set of approximately 24 million firms in nearly 100 countries in 2004 and 1999, which enables us to present both cross-country and industry...