J. Peter Neary

Cost Asymmetries in International Subsidy Games: Should Governments Help Winners or Losers?

This paper examines the optimality of export subsidies in oligopolistic markets, when home and foreign firms have different costs and there is an opportunity cost to public funds. Subsidies are found to be optimal only for surprisingly low values of the shadow price of government funds, and if subsidies are justified they should be higher the more cost-competitive are domestic firms. These results hold under both Cournot competition and Bertrand competition when firms move before governments. The results suggest that recent arguments for export subsidies apply only for firms that would be highly profitable even without subsidies.

Trade Costs and Foreign Direct Investment

This paper focuses on an apparent conflict between the theory of foreign direct investment (FDI) and recent trends in the globalized world. The bulk of FDI is horizontal rather than vertical, and standard theory predicts that horizontal FDI is discouraged when trade costs fall. This seems to conflict with the experience of the 1990s, when trade liberalisation and technological change led to dramatic reductions in trade costs yet FDI grew much faster than trade. Two possible resolutions to this paradox are explored. First, horizontal FDI in trading blocs is encouraged by intra-bloc trade liberalisation, because foreign firms establish plants in one country as export platforms to serve the bloc as a whole. Second, cross-border mergers, quantitatively more important than greenfield FDI, are encouraged rather than discouraged by falling trade costs.

GLOBALIZATION AND MARKET STRUCTURE

This paper reviews some puzzling economic aspects of globalization and argues that they cannot be satisfactorily addressed in perfectly or monopolistically competitive models. Drawing on recent work, a model of oligopoly in general equilibrium is sketched. The model ensures theoretical consistency by assuming that firms are large in their own markets but small in the economy as a whole, and ensures tractability by assuming quadratic preferences defined over a continuum of goods. Applications considered include the effects of trade liberalization on industrial structure, on cross-border merger waves, and on the distribution of income between skilled and unskilled workers. (JEL: D50, L13, F12) Copyright (c) 2003 The European Economic Association.

International Trade in General Oligopolistic Equilibrium

This paper presents a new model of oligopoly in general equilibrium and explores its implications for positive and normative aspects of international trade. Assuming “continuum-Pollak” preferences, the model allows for consistent aggregation over a continuum of sectors, in each of which a small number of home and foreign firms engage in Cournot competition. I show how competitive advantage interacts with comparative advantage to determine resource allocation, and, specializing to continuum-quadratic preferences, I explore the model’s implications for the gains from trade, for the distribution of income between wages and profits, and for production and trade patterns in a two-country world.

Foreign Competition and Wage Inequality

The author argues that increased foreign competition can affect technical choice and skill differentials even when actual imports do not rise significantly. A model is presented of general oligopolistic equilibrium (GOLE) in which a reduction in import barriers (whether technological or policy-imposed) encourages more strategic investment by incumbent firms. The predictions accord with many of the stylized facts: higher skill premia; higher ratios of skilled to unskilled workers employed in all sectors and throughout the economy; little change in import volumes or prices; and rapid technological progress with rather little change in total factor productivity. Copyright 2002 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Evaluating Economics Research in Europe: An Introduction

This paper introduces a symposium of EEA-funded studies that evaluate economics research in Europe. The paper considers some general issues in evaluations, paying special attention to the problem of selecting journal weights, and notes some special features of the individual studies. Despite their very different approaches, the same group of institutions tend to appear at the top of all lists, though individual ranks are sensitive to the choice of more or less elitist journal weights. All the studies show that the gap between economics research in Europe and the United States is narrowing, but remains very wide. (JEL: A10, J44)

Factor Mobility and International Trade

This paper develops a two-country model of trade and factor mobility, in which capital is sector-specific but international mobile. The model avoids the indeterminacy and propensity to specialise of Heckscher-Ohlin models and exhibits a rich variety of responses to exogenous shocks, including transfers, capital taxes and tariffs. The result throw light on the relationship between goods and factor trade, reconciling the conflicting views of previous writers. It is argued that the model holds out the possibility of a new paradigm in international trade theory, in which international factor movements play a central rather than a peripheral role.

Nontraded Goods and the Balance of Trade in a Neo-Keynesian Temporary Equilibrium

This paper explores the implications for international monetary economics of recent work on macroeconomic models of temporary equilibrium with rationing. A model of a small open economy is presented, which, though fully consistent in the long run with the monetary approach to the balance of payments, behaves very differently in the short run when the wage and the price of nontradeables are sticky. Among the comparative statics properties of the model are the following: a devaluation may not improve the trade balance; a wage cut may not increase employment; and technological progress has different effects, depending on the sector in which it occurs.

International Capital Mobility, Shadow Prices and the Cost of Protection

This paper studies the welfare losses from tariff protection in a general model of a small open economy where some factors are internationally mobile. It is show that, as long as the economy remains incompletely specialised, international factor mobility must raise the cost of protection. This result is illustrated in the context of the specific-factors and Heckscher-Ohlin models. In addition, its relationship to earlier work on immiserising captial inflows on negative shadow prices for factors of production is examined, which allows us to synthesise a number of recent results within a common framework.

Trade Liberalisation and Shadow Prices in the Presence of Tariffs and Quotas

This paper examines the welfare effects of partial trade liberalization when trade is restricted by tariffs, quotas or some combination of both instruments. Rules for optimal first- and second-best intervention are derived and illustrated (using a new geometric technique) in both small and large open economies. A general expression for shadow prices of factors of production, which applies in both small and large economies, with or without quotas, is also derived. Welfare paradoxes are possible whenever exogenous changes raise (lower) imports of goods subject to trade restrictions which are below (above) optimal levels.