Formal analysis of the political economy of trade policy was substantially redirected by the appearance of Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman's 1994 paper, 'Protection for Sale'. Before that article a fairly wide range of approaches were favoured by various authors on various issues, but...

The standard race-to-the-bottom result is curious in one respect. If a nation wants to attract foreign capital, providing the optimal level of public amenities (and thus charging the optimal tax rate) would seem optimal. This conjecture fails in the standard tax competition model since foreign...

Based on the recent trade models of the Heterogeneous Firms Trade (HFT) model and the Quality Heterogeneous Firms Trade (QHFT) model, we classify export goods (at the HS 6-digit level of disaggregation) by quality and price competition. We find a high proportions of quality-competition goods for...

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 applies a novel empirical approach to characterising the horizontal-ness and vertical-ness of affiliates based on Yeaple’s complex FDI concept. In its simplest form, horizontal-ness is measured as affiliates’ local sales share while their vertical-ness is measures as their share...

The trade linked to international production networks – supply-chain trade for short – is associated with momentous global economic changes. This paper presents a portrait of the global pattern of supply-chain trade and how it has evolved since 1995. The paper draws on a variety of data...

Global supply chains (GSCs) are transforming the world. This paper explores why they emerged, why they are significant and future directions they are likely to take along with some implications for policy. After putting global supply chains into an historical perspective, the paper presents an...

This paper studies tax competition in an economic geography model that allows for agglomeration economies with trade costs and heterogeneous firms. We find that the Nash equilibrium involves the large country charging a higher tax than the small nation. Lower trade costs lead to an...

Revolutionary transformations of industry and trade occurred from 1985 to the late-1990s -- the regionalisation of supply chains. Before 1985, successful industrialisation meant building a domestic supply chain. Today, industrialisers join supply chains and grow rapidly because offshored...