International Factor Movements And Trade

Finally, International Trade, Factor Movements, and the Environment addresses institutional issues on both national and international levels.

This up-to-date synthesis of the basic tools and survey results in international trade theory is unique in giving factor mobility equal billing with goods trade, highlighting factor flows in the context of a mainstream approach to trade theory. The importance of the international flow of factors has grown in recent decades, primarily because of increasing returns, imperfect competition, multinational corporations, and labor migration; theories of factor mobility and trade in goods can no longer be lumped together. Using sophisticated techniques, as well as simple economic intuitions and easy-to-follow diagrams, Kar-yiu Wong systematically presents within unified frameworks all the basic analytical techniques involved in the theories of international trade and factor mobility. Wong also provides extensive coverage of such issues as interactions between international trade in goods and capital movement, external economies of scale, monopolistic competition and differentiated products, oligopoly, welfare economics of international trade, and policy analysis for various models, and he devotes two separate chapters to multinational corporations and international labor migration. New techniques and approaches to these issues are suggested, and new results obtained for many of them. For instance, the discussion of intra-industry trade in the presence of positive transport cost and arbitrage is new, as is the systematic examination of the relationship between international trade in goods and factor mobility with external economies of scale, monopolistic competition, and oligopoly. Of particular importance to trade theorists, these issues serve as the link between neoclassical and imperfect-competition models.

Free trade in goods and factors is efficient. When we move away from economic theory and consider the policies actually followed by governments, we observe distortions being implemented both on goods and factors trades. It is natural then to question the relative merits of the two types of intervention, and the normative literature has provided only partial answers. We ask then why is the international flow of goods and factors not free, and the political economy literature has looked at the two issues only separately. In studying the determination of trade policy, a theoretical paradigm has emerged, focusing on the role of influence driven contributions. This approach has also found strong empirical support. The literature on the political economy of factor mobility, on the other hand, is fragmented. Distortions in labor and capital flows are typically the subject of different studies, and only recently a unified framework has been proposed. More work has to be done in this area as well as in integrating the political economy of trade and factor movements.