Rethinking Ricardo’s Principle of Comparative Advantage

Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage: Old Idea, New Evidence

The anecdote is famous. A mathematician, Stan Ulam, once challenged Paul Samuelson to name one proposition in the social sciences that is both true and non-trivial. His reply was: ‘Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage’; see Paul Samuelson (1995, p. 22). Truth, however, in Samuelson’s reply refers to the fact that Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage is mathematically correct, not that...

Thediscoveryof Comparative Advantage

Thus Jacob Viner (1937, p. 442) balanced the claims of E. R. A. Seligman for Robert Torrens against those of J. H. Hollander for David Ricardo. Lionel Robbins (1958) found rather more in Torrens, and J. Chipman (1965) also made much of his contribution. W. O. Thweatt (1976) made a small sensation when he attributed Ricardo’s formulation to James Mill, regarded only as a popularizer of Ricardo’s...

What Goods Do Countries Trade? a Quantitative Exploration of Ricardo’s Ideas

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 little attention in the empirical literature since the mid-1960s. The main reason behind this lack of popularity is the absence of clear theo...

The Age of Globalization and its Impact on Asia's Agricultural Trade : An Application of a Chain Comparative Advantage Index

Due to timely process of WTO negotiations, unwillingness of advanced industrial countries to give concessions to developing economies regarding tariff and non-tariff barriers on agricultural commodity imports, the ongoing initiatives in Northern hemisphere to establish new and wider free trading areas which will divert trade out of the market from Asian countries, and ineffectiveness of deepeni...

Rethinking Comparative Advantage in a Co-Creation Economy