Giuseppe Francesco Gori

Trade Costs, FDI incentives, and the Intensity of Price Competition

Empirical evidence shows that an increase in trade liberalisation causes an increase in foreign direct investments (FDIs). Here we propose an explanation to this apparent puzzle by exploiting the intensity of competition in a Bertrand duopoly with convex costs where the two firms enter in a new market. We adopt Dastidars (1995) approach, delivering a continuum of Bertrand-Nash equilibria ranging above marginal cost pricing, to show that softening competition may indeed more than offset the standard effect generated by trade costs, thereby leading to a positive relationship between trade liberalisation and FDIs.

Trade Liberalisation between Asymmetric Countries with Environmentally Concerned Consumers

This paper investigates the impact of free trade on welfare in a two-country world modelled as an international Hotelling duopoly with quadratic transport costs and asymmetric countries, where a negative environmental externality is associated with the consumption of the good produced in the smaller country. Countries’ relative sizes as well as the intensity of negative environmental externality affect potential welfare gains of trade liberalisation. In line with Lambertini (1997a) we show that, as long as no trade policy is undertaken by the government of the larger country, trade liberalisation is not feasible since the latter always loses from opening to trade. A subsidy policy in favour of the firm producing the clean good is, on the contrary, shown to give both countries the right incentives to liberalize trade. Allowing for redistributive transfers between countries further extends the parametric range for which trade liberalisation is feasible under the subsidy scheme. The alternative situation, in which the green firm is based in the larger country, is also briefly sketched to find that free trade does give rise to a global welfare increment with no need of accompanying trade policies.

Urban Functional Specialisation and the Interplay between Firm's Communication Costs

This paper focuses on the functional specialisation of a system of cities, with particular attention to the role and the formation process of secondary business centers. At the european level, the latters can be identified in the large number of regional capitals, and properly defined as cities hosting both headquarters of multi-location firms and providers of standard non-tradable business services (SBS). I present a theoretical model in which the changes in urban system’s degree of functional specialisation are linked to (i) firms’ organisational choices, since firms decide whether splitting into headquarter and production plant or remaining integrated in a single establishment and to (ii) firms’ location decision with regards to the proximity with the tradable advanced business services providers. I model two types of communication costs, one between headquarters and advanced tradable business services providers (ABS) and one between headquarters and production plants. The interplay between the two types of communication costs is shown to have effects on the transition process from an “integrated” urban system where each city hosts every different functions to a “functionally specialised” urban system where each city is either a primary business center (hosting ABS), a secondary business centers (SBS) or a pure manufacturing city and all this city-types coexist in equilibrium. In particular, I find that maximum functional specialisation of the urban system turns out to be feasible only if firms face a very high share of the total costs represented by their heaquarter spending.

Infrastructure, Accessibility and Growth in Tuscany: A Macroeconomic Impact Evaluation

The purpose of the paper is to assess the impact of the Regional Mobility and Logistic Plan (RMLP) of Tuscany on regional growth and spatial disparities between the Tuscan provinces. In order to evaluate its economic impact, we first quantify the impact in terms of changes in travel time and variations in the cost of transportation per unit of delivered output. We then make use of the Remi-Irpet model. The latter explains the agglomeration economies and productivity differentials. We find that, despite the fact that the RMLP does not solve the structural problem of mobility within Tuscany, it does make it possible to get rid of some potential constraints for long-term regional growth, even if the economic impact across the provinces is disequalizing.