There are two principal theories of why countries or regions trade: comparative advantage and increasing returns to scale. Yet there is virtually no empirical work that assesses the relative importance of these two theories in accounting for production structure and trade. We use a framework that nests an increasing returns model of economic geography featuring market effects trade models to account for the structure of regional production in Japan. We find support for the existence of economic geography effects in eight of nineteen manufacturing sectors, including such important ones as transportation equipment, iron and steel, electrical machinery, and chemicals. Moreover, we find that these effects are economically very significant. The latter contrasts with the results of Davis and Weinstein (1997), which found scant economic significance of economic geography for the structure of OECD production. We conclude that while economic geography may explain little about the international structure of production, it is very important for understanding the regional structure of production.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
6093.
Length: Date of creation: Jul 1997 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:6093
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Find related papers by JEL classification: F1 - International Economics - - Trade O1 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Engel, Charles & Rogers, John H, 1996.
"How Wide Is the Border?,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 86(5), pages 1112-25, December.
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