Public opinion in Europe seems worried about the effect of lower-wage country competition. In both newspaper articles and in policy debates, the term ‘social dumping’ is becoming more and more popular. In many countries, trade unions worried by the effect of what they call ‘unfair...

Both product differentiation through quality and capacity commitment have been shown to relax price competition. However, they have not been considered simultaneously. To this end we consider a three stage game where firms choose quality then commit to capacity and finally compete in price. We...

In this paper we investigate the firm-specific factors that account for the decision to invest in low-wage countries on the part of Italian firms in the textiles and clothing sector. This analysis is motivated by the fact that our survey data show, between 1990 and 1997, a decline of average...

We examine strategic research and development (R&D) policy for quality-differentiated products in a third-market trade model. We extend the previous work by adding a third exporting country, so that the market structure is international triopoly. We show that the presence of the third exporting...

We examine firm's pricing-to-market decisions in vertically differentiated industries featuring a large number of firms that compete monopolistically in the quality space. Firms sell goods of heterogeneous quality to consumers with non-homothetic preferences that differ in their income and thus...

A traves de un modelo vertical de diferenciacion de productos se muestra el marco institucional que maximiza el bienestar cuando dos economias se integran comercialmente y coordinan sus politicas de etiquetado y certificacion. En particular, se muestra que el etiquetado discreto, armonizado y...

We analyse the effects of simple strategic trade policy in a duopoly with vertical product differentiation where firms from a developed and less developed country compete in both qualities and prices in the domestic market. The distinction between the developed and developing country firm is...

The important characteristic of international competition between developed and less developed countries is vertical product differentiation, where firms' quality choices represent strategic decisions. Unlike the previous literature, we allow for a leadership in quality choice and the...

We analyse strategic trade policy with vertical product differentiation where firms from developed and less developed countries compete in both qualities and prices in the domestic market and where the developing country firm has a lower marginal efficiency in producing quality. We concentrate...