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 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...

The decades-long economic boom that had made East Asia one of the main engines of the global economy has also given rise to concerns about the resource requirements and environmental impacts that the combination of Asian population sizes and Western consumption patterns would engender. In...

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...