Love for quality, comparative advantage, and trade

Trade, Development, and Poverty-Induced Comparative Advantage

This paper deals with the relation between trade and development when poverty affects individual decision making. We develop a twosector model that links production and schooling decisions under poverty with standard neo-classical trade analyses. The decision to either work or acquire skills depends on households having reached subsistence levels of income, implying that the income level of a c...

Support for trade restrictions, attitudes, and understanding of comparative advantage

We asked respondents about their attitudes toward restriction of imports, their understanding of the principle of comparative advantage and their attitudes toward globalization and business. Respondents who favored import restrictions scored lower on the test of understanding of comparative advantage, and they had less favorable attitudes toward globalization and toward business. Import restric...

Industrial Organization and Comparative Advantage in Mexico's Manufacturing Trade

This paper examines some features of Mexico’s foreign trade in manufactures from the perspective of recent developments in international trade theory, while bringing some characteristics of Mexico’s industrial organization into the analysis. After a brief review of the applied literature on Mexico’s foreign trade, the paper develops a taxonomy of manufacturing industries, according to the natur...

Trade Costs and Trade Composition: Multi-Country and Product Evidence on Sources of Comparative Advantage

This paper investigates whether differences across countries in overall countryspecific trade costs affect comparative advantage and the commodity composition of trade in similar fashion to international differences in factor endowments. Industry export shares across up to 71 countries and 158 manufacturing industries for five year periods from 1972 to 1992 are shown to be greater in factor-int...

Trade Costs, Comparative Advantage and the Pattern of Trade: Multi-country and Multi-product Panel Evidence