Richard E. Caves

Responses to Trade Liberalization: Changes in Product Diversification in Foreign- and Domestic-Controlled Plants

This paper studies the impact that a small country joining a regional trade agreement, but particularly a small country, might be expected to gain from the exploitation of scale economies. It makes use of the experience of Canada when it entered into the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in the early 1990s. It finds that there was a general increase in the pace of plant commodity specialization around the time of implementation of the Free Trade Agreement. At the time of the treaty, plant diversity was found to be higher in larger plants and in industries with assets that are associated with scope economies. Diversity was also higher in industries that had higher rates of tariff protection. Over the 1980s and 1990s, plant diversity decreased with reductions in both U.S. and Canadian tariffs. And the decline was greater during the post FTA era than before, thereby suggesting that this treaty had an impact above and beyond that just engendered by the tariff reductions that were associated with it. The study also found that foreign-controlled plants tended to adjust more over the entire period.

International Competition and Industrial Performance: Allocative Efficiency, Productive Efficiency, and Turbulence

Trade exerts generally favourable effects on the performance of domestic manufacturing industries in the dimensions of allocative and productive efficiency. This paper reviews theory and recent evidence on these linkages and also explore a third effect-on the turbulence of competitive conditions and the turnover of business units. Calculations using primary census records for Canada over 1973-1992 indicate, with time and industry effect, controlled, market-share turnover, entry, exit, and mergers all increase with trade exposure. The effect is tied to market structures of differentiated products but broad international disturbances (North American Free Trade Area) also have significant effects. The normative significant of turbulence is mixed but has important positive components.

Changes in the Diversification of Canadian Manufacturing Firms (1973-1997): A Move to Specialization

This paper studies changes in diversification of firms and plants since the early 1970s in the Canadian manufacturing sector. It finds that there has been a general increase in specialization of both firms and plants. Firms have been continuously reducing the span of industries in which they operate, particularly when the industries are unrelated. Commodity specialization has also occurred at the plant level; however, in contrast to industry specialization, the pace of commodity specialization emerged late in the period, around the time of implementation of the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States. Plant specialization increased most in those plants that moved most strongly into export markets.