A global bazaar is a marketplace where small, independent enterprises buy and sell a wide range of goods globally and directly, without relying on a centralized mediator. Typical examples of global bazaars are the Yiwu Market (officially the "International Trade City") in southeast China and the...

This study analyzes whether ongoing liberalization has resulted in more profound trade expansion for Indonesia versus regional partner countries. A gravity model is first employed to find whether regional trade agreements resulted in more significant intra-regional exports or diverted trade....

This research is concerned with the comparative analysis of competitive trade within the cluster market economies of the European Union. The aim of this paper is to carry out trade analysis within the competing countries in the European market from 2009 to 2018 which represents the period after...

We propose a model of "trade" between high income and low-income groups where the rich being scared of the spread of infection hires the poor to engage them in exposure-intensive outdoor activities as workers in the household industry. People who endure hardships and sustain exposure to...

Palm oil is an essential commodity used in the manufacture of various daily products and is highly competitive with vegetable oil. However, the palm oil competition is fierce and complex due to movement of palm oil trade. The study examined the determinant, stability, and duration of...

We map United States comparative advantage between 1980 and 1995, by trading partner and region, using Balassa's export-based index of Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA). We find: temporally stable and ubiquitous US comparative advantage in differentiated producer goods (except disadvantage in...

The Ricardian model predicts that countries should produce and export relatively more in industries in which they are relatively more productive. Though one of the most celebrated insights in the theory of international trade, this prediction has received virtually no attention in the empirical...

This paper explores the relationship between government policy and comparative advantage in a neoclassical model of international trade. A specification of the Ricardo-Viner model with public goods and public inputs is presented that is used to study the role that government policy can play in...

The increasing returns revolution in trade is incomplete in an important respect there exists no compelling empirical demonstration of the role of increasing returns in determining production and trade structure. One reason is that trade patterns of the canonical increasing returns models are a...

This paper uses newly available Chinese micro data to estimate the return to college education for late 20th century China when allowing for heterogeneous returns among individuals selecting into schooling based on these differences. We use recently developed semiparametric methods to identify...

This paper explores the role of wage fund as the basic source of credit, capital or finance in a dynamic Ricardian model, which consists of three classes of agents: the workers, the capitalist, and the producers of goods. We introduce and develop an elaborate dynamic wage fund model in the...

We construct a dynamic, two-country model of trade and growth in which endogenous technological progress results from the profit-maximizing behavior of entrepreneurs. We study the role that the external trading environment and that trade and industrial policies play in the determination of...

We estimate the factors determining specialization of crop choice at the level of individual fields, distinguishing between the role of natural advantage (soil characteristics) and economies of density (scale economies achieved when farmers plant neighboring fields with the same crop). Using...

Trade theory consists of a portfolio of models. What elements might be useful in modeling the offshoring of white-collar services, or do these issues call for an entirely fresh approach? I try to identifying some of the important aspects of this phenomenon and then argue that modeling could...

We provide the first evidence that low- and middle-income countries with high education levels were more successful in developing comparative advantage in products unrelated to those they already export. In contrast, controlling for the relatedness of target products to these countries’...

We develop a model in which a worker's skills determine the worker's current wage and sector. Both the market and the worker are initially uncertain about some of the worker's skills. Endogenous wage changes and sector mobility occur as labor-market participants learn about these unobserved...

The spectacular economic development of South Korea in recent decades has continuously intrigued economists, academic community and general public. Whether such a development model be applied to other, less developed countries is one of the topics often explored in a number of studies and...

We exploit the natural experiment of Japan’s opening to international trade to examine how comparative advantage can shape a country’s long-run path towards financial development. In the late 19th century, many of Japan’s prefectures had a natural comparative advantage in silk reeling....

This paper explores the possibility of international technology transfer in lieu of trade in a model with absolute and comparative advantage. Countries having absolute advantage in producing a good may offer that technology to a possible trading partner against a fee and both the countries might...

By empirically examining the commodity structure of Japan's exports in 2000–2020, the authors have identified product groups with increased, diminished, newly emerged, and lost revealed comparative advantages (RCA). In 2020, Japan had RCA in 24 product groups with relatively high levels of...

We provide the first evidence that low- and middle-income countries with high education levels were more successful in developing comparative advantage in products unrelated to those they already export. In contrast, controlling for the relatedness of target products to these countries' exports,...

This paper studies the effect of firms'export activity on the gender wage gap among its workers. Using matched employer-employee data from Germany for the period be- tween 1993 and 2007, we show that an increase in a firm's export widens the wage gap between male and female blue-collar workers,...

In this paper, I develop a model of dynamic comparative advantage based on endogenous innovation. Firms in each of two countries devote resources to R&D in order to improve the quality of high-technology products. Research successes generate profit opportunities in the world market. The model...

The share in world exports of manufactured goods of U.S. multinational firms, including their majority-owned overseas affiliates, has been nearly stable since 1966. This stability, over a period in which the export share of the U.S. as a geographical entity was declining for the most part,...

The role of agricultural productivity in economic development is addressed in a two-sector model of endogenous growth in which a) preferences are non-homothetic and the income elasticity of demand for the agricultural good is less than unitary, and b) the engine of growth is learning-by-doing in...

A functional relationship between the degree of a country?s comparative advantage in any good and the volume of its net exports of that good to its trading partner is established using a model with per-unit-distance transportation costs between countries' coasts and their interiors. The greater...

The core subjects of trade theory are the pattern and volume of trade: which goods are traded by which countries, and how much of those goods are traded. The first part of the paper discusses evidence on comparative advantage, with an emphasis on carefully connecting theory models to data...

The present paper shows relative price competition with constant cost production for three or more countries and goods can lead to a wide variety of complex trade patterns. The universal McKenzie-Jones efficiency in the global unit input matrix reduces to relative prices of efficient goods....

We show in the world trade data that countries with more progressive personal income tax system are less likely to have comparative advantage in industris that employ a greater share of high-income occupations, such as high tech and professional service sectors. Moreover, when countries increase...

Business cycles are both less volatile and more synchronized with the world cycle in rich countries than in poor ones. We develop two alternative explanations based on the idea that comparative advantage causes rich countries to specialize in industries that use new technologies operated by...

More than a half a century ago, Bela Balassa proposed his famous revealed comparative advantage (RCA) index which represents the intensity of exports and can be represented as the ratio of actual-to-expected trade. Today, the index is still applied in the majority of empirical comparative...

In the extant body of literature on the servitization of the economy, on the one hand, and determinants of growth and development, on the other, the classic question of revealed comparative advantage (RCA) plays a prominent role. Regardless of the popularity, relevance, and validity of the use...

David Ricardo indicated in his famous numerical example in the Principles that it would be advantageous to Portugal to import English cloth made by 100 men, although it could have been produced locally with the labor of only 90 Portuguese men. As the production of the cloth required less...

We introduce quality differentiation into a Ricardian model of international trade. We show that (1) quality differentiation allows industrialized countries to be active across the full board of products, complex and simple ones, while developing countries systematically specialize in simple...

This paper uproots David Ricardo's trade theory. When his production possibility curve is concave, there is comparative disadvantage, which should mean loss from trade and hence no trade. Since concave curve is common and realistic, his trade theory is obliterated