This paper provides a comment on the analysis of the link between an economy's openness to trade and its macroeconomic elasticity of substitution (ES) presented in Saam [Saam, M., 2008. Openness to trade as a determinant of the macroeconomic elasticity of substitution. Journal of Macroeconomics...

According to a common perception, the neoclassical economy void of capital cannot evolve to strictly positive levels of output, if capital is essential. We challenge this view and claim for a broad class of production functions, encompassing the neoclassical production function, that a take-off...