Examines the role of international Ricardian specialization in economic development processes. Laursen (Copenhagen Business School) considers whether countries converge or diverge in terms of specialization patterns over time; if the role of technology can explain the direction of national trade specialization; and the implications of international specialization patterns and their changes for economic growth. Appreciative theories, neo-classical theories, post-Keynesian approaches, and evolutionary approaches are discussed in relation to each of the three issues. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Presenting new material and a fresh perspective, Technology, Trade and Growth in OECD Countries, provides a unifying framework for the exploration of the role played by specialisation in economic growth and international competitiveness.
Since the end of the second World War, economics professors and classroom textbooks have been telling us that the economy is one big machine that can be effectively regulated by economic experts and tuned by government agencies like the Federal Reserve Board. It turns out they were wrong. Their equations do not hold up. Their policies have not produced the promised results. Their interpretations of economic events -- as reported by the media -- are often of-the-mark, and unconvincing. A key alternative to the one big machine mindset is to recognize how the economy is instead an evolutionary system, with constantly-changing patterns of specialization and trade. This book introduces you to this powerful approach for understanding economic performance. By putting specialization at the center of economic analysis, Arnold Kling provides you with new ways to think about issues like sustainability, financial instability, job creation, and inflation. In short, he removes stiff, narrow perspectives and instead provides a full, multi-dimensional perspective on a continually evolving system.
World Bank Technical Paper No. 300. Provides an overview of past experiences with the introduction of agricultural technologies in World Bank-funded projects in Mediterranean climates, with an emphasis on the Middle East and North African region. The authors review the adequacy of present crop and livestock technologies, identify technical and socio-economic constraints on their adoption, and describe prospective technologies for pilot testing and full-scale introduction in future Bank-funded projects.
Serving as a teaching tool for courses in international economics, economic growth, and economic development at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, this book focuses on the dynamic long-run relationship between trade and economic growth.
This paper focuses on the sluggish growth of world trade relative to income growth in recent years. The analysis uses an empirical strategy based on an error correction model to assess whether the global trade slowdown is structural or cyclical. An estimate of the relationship between trade and income in the past four decades reveals that the long-term trade elasticity rose sharply in the 1990s, but declined significantly in the 2000s even before the global financial crisis. These results suggest that trade is growing slowly not only because of slow growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but also because of a structural change in the trade-GDP relationship in recent years. The available evidence suggests that the explanation may lie in the slowing pace of international vertical specialization rather than increasing protection or the changing composition of trade and GDP.
This work offers contributions from scholars from a range of different theoretical backgrounds which discuss why economies succeed or fail in creating the infrastructure, finance and technology to develop rapidly and catch up with others. The history of post-war catch-up/convergence is examined.
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Economics - Foreign Trade Theory, Trade Policy, grade: 1,0, Vienna University of Economics and Business (Institut für Außenwirtschaft und Entwicklung), language: English, abstract: The following paper relates two of the most important economic phenomena, namely economic growth and international trade. Before analysing the relationship between two economic phenomena in detail, an overview of some of the most prominent empirical empirical studies concerning the relationship between openness to international trade and economic growth in general is provided. As most of them seem to have reached the conclusion that trade influences growth in a positive way, the question for the reasons of this presumably positive relationship arises. Factors which cause or influence economic growth in general as well as various channels through which trade might have an influence on growth are presented in the third and forth section. The importance of various sources of economic and the Solow-Model and the AK-Model are introduced in order to distinguish between long-run and short-run effects of capital accumulation, learning by doing and R&D on economic growth. The remaining analysis concentrates on one channel in particular, namely on how trade determines a country's import and export structure. The importance of the range of products a country produces is enormous and affects economic growth and welfare. The fifth section introduces the static Ricardian model of comparative advantage in order to show how productivity levels dictate the patterns of trade and determine which products a country produces depending on static productivity levels at the time a country opens up to trade. Since productivity levels do, however, not remain constant but are influenced by learning by doing and specialisation, dynamic effects of specialisation on comparative advantage should not be neglected. For this purpose, a model of dynamic comparativ
