When there are costs of trade, such as transport or other costs, the pattern of trade may not be well described by the usual measures of comparative advantage, which simply compare a country's costs or autarky prices to those of the world. Instead, a better comparison takes into account the...

The question here is whether the dynamic effects of opening to trade will increase or decrease comparative advantage. When comparative advantage is based on the abundance or scarcity of something that is costly to acquire, one expects rational behavior to respond to a change in prices by...

We examine the effects of trade liberalization on structural changes at the plant-level and industry-level. The traditional Heckscher-Ohlin (H-O) model predicts an increase in capital-labor ratios in a labor abundant country after trade liberalization. This is in marked contrast to the...

This paper examines the effects of "fragmentation," defined as the splitting of a production process into two or more steps that can be undertaken in different locations but that lead to the same final product. Introducing the possibility of fragmentation into simple theoretical models of...

A neoclassical growth model is used to provide an explanation for a "poverty trap," or "club convergence," in terms of specialization and international trade. The model has a large number of countries with access to identical constant-returns-to-scale technologies for producing and trading three...

Policies to redistribute income between high- and low-income groups are well known to distort factor supply decisions and thereby to generate deadweight losses incidental to income redistribution. This paper examines the effects that these same distortions may also have on factor supplies...

This paper uses simple trade theory to interpret global imbalance. A world equilibrium in which one country runs a trade surplus and the other a deficit can be interpreted as the welfare improving outcome of free inter-temporal trade. However, comparative advantage would predict that the surplus...

We offer a simple variant of the standard Heckscher-Ohlin Model that explains how a developing country, by opening to trade with a large capital-abundant economy, can be induced to shift resources into more capital-intensive production than what it was producing in autarky. As a result it...

This paper derives bilateral trade from two cases of the Heckscher-Ohlin Model, both also representing a variety of other models as well. First is frictionless trade, in which the absence of all impediments to trade in homogeneous products causes producers and consumers to be indifferent among...

Recent concern has attended the phenomenon of skilled-labor outsourcing, in which firms in the U.S. and other advanced countries have drawn upon the services of skilled workers in developing countries for activities that they used to do at home. Motivated by this and the fact that such...