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...

In the context of stalled multilateral trade negotiations, major trading economies are seeking free trade agreements (FTAs) to secure their market access objectives. Nowhere is this dynamic stronger than in East Asia, where a web of bilateral and plurilateral agreements is stitching together...

As low cost oil reserves are depleted over the coming decades and replaced by higher-cost sources and other forms of energy that are less easily used for transportation, the cost of shipping goods internationally will increase, perhaps very substantially. This will have a pervasive impact on the...

For apparently irreconcilable domestic political reasons, the United States is an outlier amongst economically advanced countries as the only one that does not have a value added tax (VAT), which is the conventional and WTO-sanctioned approach to applying an economically efficient and...