When two countries, starting from different quality levels reflecting different conditions of domestic market demand, open to trade, two possible equilibria arise. In the first, the quality leader maintains its position. In the second, leapfrogging occurs. The latter is possible only if the...

This paper considers a dynamic North South model of international trade and innovations in which firms can endogenously bias the direction of technological change. We show that, when there is a differential degree of protection of property rights between the two regions, innovating firms face a...

Recent evidence shows that the ‘home bias puzzle’ in international trade may be associated with the mere presence of national borders (McCallum (1995)). In this Paper we provide a theoretical framework to explain why borders may matter so much for trade. Our argument is that even between...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model of North-South trade and economic growth. Both innovation and imitation rates are endogenously determined as well as the degree of wage inequality between Northern and Southern workers. Northern firms devote resources to innovative R&D to...

We extend the model by Krugman (1980) to a multi-country set-up and show that the ‘home-market effect’ highlighted with two countries does not readily extend to such a general setting. In particular, we prove that the most important result, namely the disproportionate causation from demand...

This Paper examines optimal trade policy in a two-period oligopoly model, with a home and a foreign firm choosing capital and output. Demand uncertainty, resolved in period two, gives rise to a trade-off between strategic commitment and flexibility in the firms’ investment decisions. When the...

This paper studies the investment creation and investment diversion effects of the EU's Single Market programme (EU92). We find suggestive, but not conclusive, evidence indicating that EU92 may have led to investment diversion in the economies of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and...

This paper has two purposes. It introduces a direct approach to policy analysis in endogenous growth models - the q-theory approach - and uses this to illustrate several new openness-and-growth links that appear when we enrich the economic content of the early trade and growth models. The...

This paper analyses the effects of regional integration on the location of increasing-returns industry and the resulting pattern of trade. Theoretically, it is shown that regional integration may initially lead to a dispersion of industry inside the customs union. Below a certain threshold of...

Public opinion in Europe seems worried about the effect of lower-wage country competition. In both newspaper articles and in policy debates, the term ‘social dumping’ is becoming more and more popular. In many countries, trade unions worried by the effect of what they call ‘unfair...