We examine two important aspects of Australia’s terms of trade using 135 years of annual data up to 2003/04. Since Australia predominantly exports commodities and imports manufactures, the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis suggests that there should be a negative trend in the terms of trade. But the trend is no more than −0.1 per cent per annum, less than the trend decline in world commodity prices re...

I apply concentration measures from the inequality literature the Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient to the measurement of global and regional integration, and show that these can be derived from the theoretical gravity model in the presence of unequal costs of access for firms from different locations to a particular market. Overall, comparing 9 economies, I find that the USA is the most global...

__________________________________________________________________ International trade is frequently thought of as a production technology in which the inputs are exports and the outputs are imports. Exports are transformed into imports at the rate of the price of exports relative to the price of imports: the reciprocal of the terms of trade. Cast this way, a change in the terms of trade acts a...