Small farmers in many tropical developing countries practice swidden agriculture. A key aspect of swidden agriculture is the time period during which the land is left fallow. This paper uses a new ecological-economic approach to study the fallow period and to determine the optimal length of this...

The paper constructs a general equilibrium model of North–South trade with nontraded goods, real exchange rate, and a continuum of components that North partly offshores to South. It is shown that a protectionary policy which restricts offshoring may have the unintended consequence of widening...

Currency depreciation has been studied conventionally in terms of three hypotheses-the elasticities approach, the monetary approach and the absorption approach. In this paper we offer another hypothesis called the price approach, wherein the balance of payment disequilibrium results from an...

In this paper, we re-examine the effects of equity control of multinational firms on resource allocation and national welfare in a model with rural-urban migration and urban unemployment. A large number of recipient (host) countries are developing countries with dual economies. We indicate,...

Outsourcing has become an increasingly contentious subject ever since N. Gregory Mankiw remarked in 2004 that outsourcing is just another way of doing international trade, and must be beneficial to the nation, including the workers. We construct a simple two-sector specific-factor model and...

The paper explains most, if not all, observations made by the empirical literature regarding the behavior of skilled and unskilled real wages in the United States, especially those since 1980. Generalizing the Stopler-Samuelson theorem, the authors show that the nontraded sector is critical to...

When trade reform contracts protected formal sectors in developing countries and the formal workers move to the informal sector for employment, does that reduce informal wages? Using a 2 × 2 Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson (HOS) structure with formal-informal production organization for the same...