This paper provides a new perspective on Chinese international competitiveness in manufacturing using relative unit labour costs. We find that Chinese unit labour costs are about 25-40 per cent of US labour costs. They are also low relative to costs in the EU, Japan, Mexico, Korea and most other...

Globalization. The word often conjures up an image of a worldwide society--no boundaries, no borders, no barriers. Economically speaking, in a truly borderless world, financial capital, production activities, and labor would flow as easily between countries as they do within a country. But is...

The bilateral trade flows between Canada and the U.S. are the world's largest and have grown rapidly in the 1990s. Are they evidence of a North American trading bloc? A gravity model of trade finds that while economic size and proximity can explain much of the substantial trade between Canada...

In the late 1980s, Canada's provinces traded 20 times more with one another than with U.S. states of comparable size and distance. In other words, the Canada-U.S. border exerted a strong effect on the pattern of Canada's continental trade patterns. Since then, globalization and the formation of...

This study investigates the behaviour of intranational prices for 45 specific consumer goods across 25 Canadian cities. It finds positive roles for distance and provincial borders in intercity price disparities. While sizable, the provincial border effect is an order of magnitude smaller than...