Monopolistic Competition and International Trade

The 1980s have seen significant advances in coordinating analyses of foreign trade with those of industrial organization. Contributors to this volume illuminate topics in trade theory, including the role of R & D, the nature of gains from trade, the part played by scale economies, the arguments for intervention, theories of intra-industry trade, international capital movements under monopolistic competition, and economic integration and product differentiation.

This is a collection of conference papers presented to a workshop at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. The papers throw new light on a number of important questions: the role of R & D, the nature of gains from trade, the part played by scale economies, and the arguments for intervention.

Henryk Kierzkowski: Introduction; James Markusen & James Melvin: The gains-from-trade theorem with increasing returns to scale; Avner Shaked & John Sutton: Natural oligopolies and international trade; Henrik Horn: Product diversity, trade, and welfare; Jonathan Eaton & Henryk Kierzkowski: Oligopolistic competition, product variety, and international trade; Frances Stewart: Recent theories of international trade: Some implications for the South; Avinash Dixit: Growth and terms of trade under imperfect competition; Elhanan Helpman and Assaf Razin: Increasing returns, monopolistic competition, and factor movements: A welfare analysis; Kelvin Lancaster: Protection and product differentiation; Bruce R. Lyons: The pattern of international trade in differentiated products: An incentive for the existence of multinational firms; Paul Krugman: Import protection as export promotion: International competition in the presence of oligopoly and economies of scale; James Brander & Barbara Spender: Tariff protection and imperfect competition; Wilfred Ethier & Henrik Horn: A new look at economic integration; David Greenaway: The measurement of product differe ntiation in empirical analyses of trade flows; Index