The Theory of the Second Best implies that any country with less-than-ideal resources can lose from international trade. Recently it has been suggested this means the South (poor countries) are better off suppressing trade with the North, especially trade in natural resource products, since the...

This is Bruegel’s third report on the internationalisation of European firms, and the first one that relies on new, internationally consistent data resulting from the seven-country survey undertaken within the framework of the EFIGE (European Firms in a Global Economy) project. In the first,...

The costs of import substitution (IS) as a strategy for industrialization, which was deemed synonymous with economic development by many development economists of the fifties and sixties, were shown to be substantial in the influential and nuanced studies of the seventies and eighties under the...

Despite the clear influence of European Union biotechnology restrictions on trade patterns, very little work has been done to model these influences or their long-run effects. This paper presents an economic trade theory model of biotechnology, biotechnology research and development (R&D), and...

The post-World War II world trading system is now more than fifty years old, and not surprisingly, it has evolved through a number of different stages of development and survived a series of perils. Recently, however, the perils seem even greater than before. The failure of the Seattle...

Several interesting developments indicate that world attention is increasingly focusing on a "novel" category of trade barriers: non-tariff and non-border barriers. Following the Uruguay Round (the eighth round of negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, "GATT"), scholars...

This paper introduces the concepts of direct and indirect factor trade utility functions and uses them to derive Marshallian and Hicksian factor content functions, which express the quantities of factors of production embodied in net imports as functions of the exogenous variables facing the...

This paper develops a two-country model of trade and factor mobility, in which capital is sector-specific but internationally mobile. The model avoids the indeterminacy and propensity to specialize of Heckscher-Ohlin models and exhibits a rich variety of responses to exogenous shocks, including...

Extract: As the Heckscher-Ohlin-Mundell paradigm predicts, in a world where capital markets are perfect and production exhibits constant-returns to scale, while aggregate wealth endowments can be an important source of comparative advantage, their internal distribution does not matter for the...