The paper argues that East Asian regionalism is fragile because (i) each nation's industrial competitiveness depends on the smooth functioning of "Factory Asia" - in particular for intraregional trade; (ii) the unilateral tariff-cutting that created Factory Asia is not subject to WTO discipline...

The 'core-periphery model' is vitiated by its assumption of static expectations. That is, migration (inter-regional or intersectoral) is the key to agglomeration, but migrants base their decision on current wage differences alone--even though migration predictably alters wages and workers are...

The new' economic geography focuses on the footloose-labor and the vertically-linked-industries models. Both are complex since they feature demand-linked and cost-linked agglomeration forces. I present a simpler model where agglomeration stems from demand-linked forces arising from endogenous...

This paper shows that the market structure of an economy's research sector is an important determinant of the aggregate growth rate, even though it has hereto been ignored in the new growth literature. To make this point in a concrete context, a simple model is used to show that import...

Small transaction costs and uncertainty imply that optimal cross-currency interest rate speculation is marked by a first-order hysteresis band. Consequently uncovered interest parity does not hold and market efficiency tests based on it are misspecified. Indeed measured prediction errors are a...

Standard trade theory views the capital stock as an endowment. However, trade policy can affect a country's steady-state capital stock. By ignoring the endogeneity of capital, standard analysis is incomplete and can be misleading. For instance, when capital in endogenous, the Stolper-Samuelson...

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 takes a step towards formalizing the theoretical interconnections among four post-Industrial Revolution phenomena - the industrialization and growth take-off of rich 'northern' nations, massive global income divergence, and rapid trade expansion. Specifically, we present a stages-of...

FDI has received surprisingly little attention in theoretical and empirical work on openness and growth. This paper presents a theoretical growth model where MNCs directly affect the endogenous growth rate via technological spillovers. This is novel since other endogenous growth models with...