scholarly journals Is Free Trade Passé?

1987 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R Krugman
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Comparative Advantage ◽  
Imperfect Competition ◽  
Perfect Competition ◽  
Trade Theory ◽  
International Trade Theory ◽  
Export Subsidies ◽  
Good Policy ◽  
Import Restrictions

If there were an Economist's Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations “I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage” and “I advocate Free Trade.” Yet the case for free trade is currently more in doubt than at any time since the 1817 publication of Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy, and this is due to changes that have recently taken place in the theory of international trade. While new developments in international trade theory may not yet be familiar to the profession at large, they have been substantial and radical. In the last ten years the traditional constant returns, perfect competition models of international trade have been supplemented and to some extent supplanted by a new breed of models that emphasizes increasing returns and imperfect competition. These new models call into doubt the extent to which actual trade can be explained by comparative advantage; they also open the possibility that government intervention in trade via import restrictions, export subsidies, and so on may under some circumstances be in the national interest after all. To preview this paper's conclusion: free trade is not passé, but it is an idea that has irretrievably lost its innocence. Its status has shifted from optimum to reasonable rule of thumb. There is still a case for free trade as a good policy, and as a useful target in the practical world of politics, but it can never again be asserted as the policy that economic theory tells us is always right.

scholarly journals International Trade Arising from Wage Differences

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (Special Edition) ◽  
pp. 135-154
Author(s):  
Sikander Rahim
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Industrial Policy ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
High Wage ◽  
Trade Theory ◽  
Wage Differences ◽  
International Trade Theory

This paper analyzes how trade can develop between low and high wage countries when there is free trade and when there is protection. In particular, the paper focuses on Pakistani industrial development from the 1950’s and how standard international trade theory relies on specific assumptions about the nature of capital, which may not hold. This, in turn, has specific implications for industrial policy in low wage countries.

scholarly journals Ricardo and Haberler: an essay on the evolution of the economic thought based on the four magic numbers in the international trade theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (77) ◽  
pp. 171-185
Author(s):  
Flavia Poinsot
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
Comparative Advantage ◽  
Labor Cost ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Magic Numbers ◽  
Trade Theory ◽  
International Trade Theory ◽  
New Research ◽  
Over Time

The Ricardian comparative advantage is one key cornerstone in the international trade theory. There is no shortage of textbooks supposing that Ricardo used solely labour as a factor of production. This approach originates with Haberler in the 1930s, who wrote that Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage is robust, but not the labor-cost doctrine, which, Haberler assumed, Ricardo applied. This paper summarizes why Haberler’s perspective emerged, essaying an explanation of his way of interpreting Ricardo. To do this, we considered the new research on Ricardo, whose facets to be known seem to renew over time and never end.

scholarly journals Free Trade in Theory and Policy: Contemporary Challenges

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-35
Author(s):  
Daniel Nagel ◽  
Sorin Burnete
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Comparative Advantage ◽  
Policy Instruments ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Trade Theory ◽  
Common Parlance ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Foreign Competitors

Abstract Free trade denotes a state of international commercial relations premised on governments’ restraint from using policy instruments meant to favor indigenous industries against foreign competitors. According to the conventional trade theory advocated by classical and neo-classical thinkers, free trade makes little economic sense failing nations’ tendency to specialize based on comparative advantage, a concept with high persuasive influence despite the elapsing of time. Even though the comparative advantage rule has seldom been questioned per se, the free trade concept has been fiercely disputed and not infrequently, bashed. Nations’ involvement in international trade often follows patterns that do not fit theoretical models but attempt to respond to circumstantial interests, most often the need to protect poorly competitive industries. In common parlance, free trade has had both proponents and enemies.

Ten Pages that Changed the World: Deconstructing Ricardo∗

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Peet
Keyword(s):  
Free Trade ◽  
Economic Geography ◽  
Comparative Advantage ◽  
Development Policy ◽  
Open Market ◽  
Trade Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Neoliberal Development ◽  
Trading Scheme ◽  
Political Economic

Powerful ideas that shape the world become taken-for-granted verities, in two senses of the term: as the only world that is known; and as the only world that can be imagined. When hegemony controls the imagination, fundamental criticism becomes difficult, and perhaps, impossible. Yet what if there were flaws in the original idea, from which new worlds were constructed, that have materialized in a political-economic geography beset with seemingly unsolvable problems? For example, what if there have always been fundamental flaws in the free trade, open market, competitive, global system that dominates both the world as we know it and the conventional political-economic-geographical thought we know it through? This article speculates that a psycho-discursive act of deconstruction might unravel the entire, subsequent discourse. It aims deconstruction at a founding statement in the free trade, global ideal, by looking critically at David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. Ricardo's argument that specialization and free trade are universally beneficial, became a founding premise of conventional economic theory and a basic prescription of liberal and neoliberal development policy. The article looks critically: at the logical consistency and representational accuracy of Ricardo's theory, especially the claim that all participants benefit from participation in a free trading scheme, so that trade brings about a far better world. The article reaches two main, critical conclusions: free trade theory based in comparative advantage has, from the beginning, been an ideology for creating economic spaces open to domination by powerful, leading countries; economics and economic geography have, since their classical beginnings, been biased in that their founding statements reverse the reality they pretend accurately to represent.

Trade and Spatial Growth

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-111
Author(s):  
Sirimal Abeyratne ◽  
N. S. Cooray
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
Comparative Advantage ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Spatial Concentration ◽  
Trade Theory ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
Spatial Growth

Comparative advantage is based on ‘locational factors’ so that trade leads to growth and its spatial concentration. Until recently, the nexus between trade and spatial growth received little space within trade analyses though it did not appear to be a missing link in initial contributions to trade theory. The reshaping of the global economy with greater integration has called for analyses of trade and spatial growth. This article examines theoretical premises of the link between international trade and spatial growth, and the implications of reshaping of the global economy for the study of spatial growth within trade theory.

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