The purpose of this paper is to call attention to the need for a theory of comparative national price levels and to explore some of the elements that seem to belong to such a theory. Most theoretical discussions have maintained that national price levels tend towards equality and focus on...

Fears that production abroad would cause home country exports and employment to fall have not been confirmed by evidence. Multinational operations have led to a shift by parent firms in the United States toward more capital- intensive and skill- intensive domestic production. However, that type...

This paper describes two databases dealing with world bilateral trade flows: the World Trade Database (WTDB) assembled by Statistics Canada, which contains bilateral trade flows for all countries over 1970-1992, classified according to the Standard International Trade Classification, Revision 2...

As production comes to depend more on intangible productive assets, the location of production by multinational firms becomes increasingly ambiguous. The reason is that, within the firm, these assets have no clear geographical location, but only a nominal location determined by the firm's tax or...

This paper distinguishes between the competitive position of U.S. firms and that of the U.S. and other countries as geographical locations for production. While the share of the U.S. in world exports of manufactures fellmore than 40 per cent between 1957 and 1977, the share of all U.S. firms...

A substantial part of international differences in prices of individual products, both goods and services, can be explained by differences in per capita income, wage compression, or low wage dispersion among low-wage workers, and short-term exchange rate fluctuations. Higher per capita income is...

This paper examines changes in national price levels and prices of tradables and nontradables and relates them to changes in variables found earlier to be associated with price level differences among countries. Across countries, national price levels increase systematically with the level of a...

The standard measures of nominal capital formation show the United States investing a proportion of GDP much lower than those of other developed countries throughout the last 25 years and falling further behind over time. In contrast, measures we have calculated in real terms across countries...

Multinational firms have played an important role in leading the developing countries into world markets. Multinationals from the United States, Japan and Sweden have all increased their shares of LDC exports of manufactures since the mid-1960s or mid-1970s. Their importance was particularly...

The share in world exports of manufactured goods of U.S. multinational firms, including their majority-owned overseas affiliates, has been nearly stable since 1966. This stability, over a period in which the export share of the U.S. as a geographical entity was declining for the most part,...