This paper claims that distance alone is a poor proxy for international transport costs in gravity equations. We develop a theoretical framework with a manufacturing and a transport sector, where the level of manufacturing exports determines the demand for transport. Above a certain threshold,...

The distance puzzle has been wildly discussed in the literature since Leamer and Levinsohn (1995) shed the light on it. This puzzle simply says that "the world is not getting smaller": distance still matters to account for trade. This is reflected in a decreasing distance of trade (DOT), or in a...

This study considers endogenous determination of domestic standards on products that cause negative consumption externalities in the presence of a preferential trade agreement (PTA) in a three-country world. In particular, we examine how a PTA affects the optimal levels of external tariffs and...

Does trade improve institutions and contribute to long run growth? I develop a theory of trade, in which trade liberalization provides incentive to change institutions in two ways. On the one hand, trade leads to specialization according to comparative advantage, expanding the industries that do...

This paper reconsiders the theoretical foundations of EU regional policy in economics. It begins with a discussion of the line of thought of its prevalent explanation in equilibrium economics which is focusing on market failures as its key underpinning and which is the major toolkit of...

The last one and a half centuries have witnessed dramatic changes in the world economy. The service (tertiary) sector, which at the beginning of the 20th century was of little importance relative to agriculture and manufacturing, has become the dominant sector today, accounting for 80% and more...

This paper reports the application of our new spatial computable general equilibrium (SCGE) model for analyzing the wider effects of strategic transport and land use development options. We examine the insights afforded by a SCGE model relative to those provided by existing land use and...

The paper proposes a model to investigate the influences of agglomeration on heterogeneous firms' exporting behaviors. In the model, firms are heterogeneous in productivity. Selection effect and agglomeration economies caused by agglomeration increase firms' productivity and decreases industrial...

This paper analyses the political economy of environmental policies in the presence of an eco-industry pressure group. Previous studies have dealt with two types of lobbies: capitalists and environmentalists. We introduce a third pressure group representing the eco-industry sector. Under this...

In the literature of new trade theory, most papers study the industrial location by imposing the assumption of free transportation in the agricultural sector. This paper explicitly incorporates arbitrary transport costs in both the manufacturing and the agricultural sectors into the...