Infl ows of foreign knowledge are the key for developing countries to catch up with the world technology frontier. In this paper, I construct a simple tractable model to analyze (a) the incentives of foreign fi rms to bring their know-how to a developing country and (b) the incentives of...

In the current age of trade and financial openness, local economies in developing countries are becoming increasingly exposed to external investments. The objective of the proposed two-sector model with environmental externalities is to provide an insight into the interaction between external...

Using Japanese firm data covering the Japanese financial crisis in the early 1990s, we find that exporters' domestic sales declined more significantly than their foreign sales, which in turn declined more significantly than non-exporters' sales. This stylized fact provides a new litmus test for...

Decision makers facing abatement targets need to decide which abatement measures to implement, and in which order. Measure-explicit marginal abatement cost curves depict the cost and abating potential of available mitigation options. Using a simple intertemporal optimization model, we...

Economists have expended considerable effort to develop economically meaningful definitions of the somewhat elusive concept of "sustainability". We relate such a definition of sustainability to well known concepts from neoclassical economics, in particular, potential Pareto improvements (in the...

For the study of economic integration, it is costumary to use a three countryworld, where two of the countries may introduce forms of closer economic cooperation. In the present model, we follow this tradition but put special emphasis on the role of credit and entrepreneurship. Our model is of...

We show that the standard concertina result for tariff reforms – i.e. lowering the highest tariff increases welfare – no longer holds in general if we allow for international capital mobility. The result can break down if the good whose tariff is lowered is not capital intensive. If the...

International trade in capital goods has quantitatively important effects on economic development through capital formation and TFP. Capital goods trade enables poor countries to access more efficient technologies, leading to lower relative prices of capital goods and higher capital-output...

In this paper we provide a method to characterise global value chains and a related decomposition of bilateral gross exports by distinguishing three different stages of the value-added flows: (i) the source of value added, (ii) the final assembly stage of a product, and (iii) the final...

Economic activities are highly clustered. Why is geographic concentration becoming a predominant feature of modern economies? On the basis of the empirical models developed by the 'new' theories of international trade, our answer is that increasing returns are the driving force of economic...