IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mie/wpaper/423.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Benefits and Costs of Following Comparative Advantage

Author

Listed:
  • Deardorff, A.V.

Abstract

This paper is the text of a lecture given on November 20, 1997 to inaugurate the John W. Sweetland Chair in International Economics, in the Department of Economics of the University of Michigan. Its message is that international trade theory, and in particular the theory of comparative advantage, is really just an application of benefit-cost analysis. This is true both of many of the tools of trade theory, which are familiar as the same tools by which benefit-cost examines all sorts of public projects and policies, and of the implications of the theory. Trade theory does not say, as sometimes claimed, that international trade is necessarily and always good for everyone. On the contrary, the theory of comparative advantage identifies both winners and losers from international trade, and the subtlety of the argument, much like many applications of benefit-cost analysis, consists of quantifying and comparing the gains and losses. The paper works through both the partial and the general equilibrium analyses of trade under a range of assumptions from implausibly perfect to realistically messy. It discusses who gains and who loses from trade in each case, as well as the strength of the argument that the gains outweigh the losses.

Suggested Citation

  • Deardorff, A.V., 1998. "Benefits and Costs of Following Comparative Advantage," Working Papers 423, Research Seminar in International Economics, University of Michigan.
  • Handle: RePEc:mie:wpaper:423
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    INTERNATIONAL TRADE;

    JEL classification:

    • F10 - International Economics - - Trade - - - General
    • F11 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Neoclassical Models of Trade

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mie:wpaper:423. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: FSPP Webmaster (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/riumius.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.