There is a wide disparity of views on issues of international labor standards. The purpose of this paper is to explore these different views and the available options for addressing the issues involved. We conclude that there is no convincing case for incorporating labor standards into the WTO...

This paper is the text of a lecture given on November 20, 1997 to inaugurate the John W. Sweetland Chair in International Economics, in the Department of Economics of the University of Michigan. Its message is that international trade theory, and in particular the theory of comparative...

This paper is about jobs and international trade. It is about researchers can learn fo relationship between the two using firm-level data.

A test of the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek [HOV] hypothesis for the cases when factor price equalization does not hold is developed. For all the possible country pairs of the BLS (1987) and Trefler (1995) data set, I test whether trade reveals the relative factor abundance of one country compared to...

This paper explores the rule system of the World Trade Organization (WTO) as reflected mainly in the new and innovative WTO dispute settlement procedures. It begins with a retrospective look at the history of GATT on this subject. The goal of the rest of the paper is then not just to describe...

In this study, done for the OECD, we assess currently available methods for quantifying nontariff barriers (NTBs) and make recommendations as to those methods that can be most effectively employed. We focus both on the conceptual issues arising in the measurement of the different types of NTBs...

A neoclassical growth model is used to provide an explanation for a "poverty trap," or "club convergence," in terms of specialization and international trade. The model has a large number of countries with access to identical constant-returns-to-scale technologies for producing and trading three...

A half-century of empirical work on the factor proportions theory has but has failed to devise simple amendments that bring theory and data into reasonable congruence. Our study considers standard and novel hypotheses regarding the failures of the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek formulation and is the...