With strategic interactions and endogenous entry in a market, opening up to trade creates gains under very general conditions. Under Dixit-Stiglitz preferences and Cournot (or Bertrand) competition, an expansion of the market size induces exit of domestic firms, lower prices and larger...

This paper examines the extent to which electricity supply constraints could affect sectoral specialization. For this purpose, an empirical trade model is estimated from 1990-2008 panel data on 15 OECD countries and 12 manufacturing sectors. We find that along with Ricardian technological...

The question here is whether the dynamic effects of opening to trade will increase or decrease comparative advantage. When comparative advantage is based on the abundance or scarcity of something that is costly to acquire, one expects rational behavior to respond to a change in prices by...

We derive several cases of 'comparative advantage in nothing', which can be relevant for East Germany. The simplest case with little relevance is the HO assumption of identical technologies across regions implanted into the Ricardian model. The second is the case with full employment wages...

This paper develops a model of international trade based on the division of labor and comparative advantage. Labor is used to produce traded intermediate inputs which are used in the production of traded final goods. Large countries gain relatively more from comparative advantage than from the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explain the determination of China's agricultural foreign trade pattern since the World Trade Organization (WTO) accession. Design/methodology/approach – The neoclassical trade theory indicates that differences in both technology levels and factor...

Is the skill gap of net exports widening? This question is nontrivial for many industrial countries because, with the rapid growth of emerging countries, human capital is considered one of the most important sources of comparative advantage. Theoretically, however, the answer is not necessarily...

Sino-European trade relations have affected Europe's bilateral comparative advantages over time. The change in bilateral trade is compared to the overall development of European trade to highlight the features of China's structural change. China is shown to be increasingly specializing in...

This paper develops an approach for quantifying the importance of different sources of comparative advantage for country welfare. To explain patterns of specialization, I present a multi-country trade model that extends Eaton and Kortum (2002) to predict industry trade ows. In this framework,...

In his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Adam Smith (1776) considered the phenomenon of division of labor so enormously significant for the creation of a nation’s wealth that he devoted the first three chapters of his book to an investigation of this process. This is...