This paper studies externalities of nationally determined cost-sharing systems, in particular coinsurance rates (patients pay a percentage of the price), under pharmaceutical parallel trade, i.e. trade outside the manufacturer’s authorized distribution channel, in a two-country model with a vertical distributor relationship. Parallel trade generates a price-decreasing competition e¤ect in the d...

I woke up to the sound of morning glory frying as my host mother, Pikoon Phanloed, cooked up breakfast before starting her morning chores on the farm. I was on one of my first home stays during my fall 2011 semester in northeastern Thailand, living with a family involved in the Alternative Agriculture Network (AAN)—a non-governmental organization that promotes sustainable agriculture. The sun w...

The Southern Common Market (mercosur), widely recognized as one of the most advanced regional integration schemes worldwide, is increasingly attractive to multinational enterprises and also very active in outward investments, despite persistent innovation and competitiveness gaps. In this paper we analyse internationalization and technology trends in mercosur in relation to trade, the activitie...

The devaluation of the Mexican peso of 1995 along with the more recent financial crises in emerging economies are viewed as systematic outcomes of the operation of free currency markets. The hypothesis is that there exists a distortion in free currency markets that makes developing countries systematically misallocate resources. The distortion lies in “asymmetric reputation” that leads to subst...

Corporate political activity (CPA) can be an important element in any firm’s effort to gain competitive advantage. This has been particularly true in the area of international trade, where domestic producers seek to bar or disadvantage foreign competitors in the home market though the imposition of trade protection. In the United States the imposition of anti-dumping duties (AD) or countervaili...

The global welfare implications of home market effects in trade models with imperfect competition are little understood. This paper proposes a simple model in which such implications can be easily analyzed. It shows an overall tendency of imperfectly competitive sectors to inefficiently cluster in locations that offer market access advantages. The more so the stronger the market power of firms ...

This paper evaluates the new theories of trade and economic geography in the light of the pattern of regional specialisation in Southern Africa. The analysis is applied to the nine South African provinces and the SADC member countries of 1995, except Angola. Based on Gini coefficients, the regional specialisation of provinces and countries and dispersion/concentration of manufacturing employmen...

Collective decision-making is a characteristic of societies ranging from ants to humans. The ant Temnothorax albipennis is known to use quorum sensing to collectively decide on a new home; emigration to a new nest site occurs when the number of ants favouring the new site becomes quorate. There are several possible mechanisms by which ant colonies can select the best nest site among alternative...

We show that spatial inequalities in an economic space of multiple countries in terms of both nominal income and real income are ubiquitous in the sense that they appear when countries are differentiated by population only. A new trade theory model is constructed without any freely traded homogeneous good, so that we can examine the home market effect (HME) and the non-monotonic relation betwee...