When national competitiveness is invoked as a policy objective, trade experts have learned to retort that countries don`t trade, firms do. This focus on the importance of the firm in international trade is consistent with the most recent developments in trade theory, but policy needs to catch...

When national competitiveness is invoked as a policy objective, trade experts have learned to retort that countries don't trade, firms do. This focus on the importance of the firm in international trade is consistent with the most recent developments in trade theory, but policy needs to catch...

When national competitiveness is invoked as a policy objective, trade experts have learned to retort that countries don't trade, firms do. This focus on the importance of the firm in international trade is consistent with the most recent developments in trade theory, but policy needs to catch...

This note seeks to shed light on how economies develop by reconciling the apparent conflict between diversification and specialization as the path to development, and alternative conceptions of an economy as an equilibrium system of optimizing agents versus a driven system dependent on...

Participation in the modern, globalized economy necessarily entails some degree of economy-level specialization in terms of the relative intensities of activities, since all economies – and especially developing ones – are small relative to the global economy. At the same time, it has been...

This paper explores the implications of recent developments in firm-based trade theory and empirics for trade policy and negotiations. While traditional trade theory focused on the country, and the new trade theory of the 1980’s adopted the industry as the unit for analysis, the newest theory...

This paper considers the reasons why APEC's potential remains, after its first decade in existence, as yet largely unfulfilled. APEC’s progress is assessed in terms of three periods: 1989 through 1992, when it was primarily in an exploratory mode, probing for direction and ways and means for...

The BRICs economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) created a buzz with a strong run in the global expansion of the 2000s and the help of a little pumping up of their tires by Goldman Sachs analysts who projected these economies would surpass the advanced countries within a few decades. The...

The Trump Administration made a fundamental break with longstanding US trade policy. This break might be explained as expressing Trump’s affinity for traditional American isolationism. In some respects, it might also be described as an expression of strongly held personal views of Trump’s...

Starting with the Trump Administration and continuing under the Biden Administration America’s trade policy can be characterized as one of “destructive isolationism”. It has undermined the multilateral trade system whose creation it had led; pulled America out of the Trans-Pacific...