North-South trade competition cannot be an explanation for the adverse trend for U.S. unskilled wages. If wage competition in these industries from abroad pushed down wages, then prices of these goods should also have gone down, and they have not. Also VERs and anti-dumping measures have...

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...

The paper dissects the hypothesis that democracy is inimical to economic development. The historical origin of this perspective is presented and its key theoretical and empirical assumptions are examined and assessed. The chief conclusion is that there is no necessary tradeoff between democracy...

Paul Krugman's model of trade predicts that the country with the relatively large number of consumers is the net exporter and hosts a disproportionate share of firms in the increasing returns sector. He terms these results "home market effects". This paper analyses three additional models...

Recent theories of economic geography suggest that firms in the same industry may be drawn to the same locations because proximity generates positive externalities or 'agglomeration effects.' Under this view, chance events and government inducements can have a lasting influence on the...