IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/reveco/v54y2018icp244-261.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The gains from trade in intermediate goods: A Ricardo-Sraffa-Samuelson model

Author

Listed:
  • Soo, Kwok Tong

Abstract

This paper develops a model of intermediate and final goods trade based on comparative advantage. Firms endogenously decide whether to produce a final good directly using labour, or indirectly using both labour and intermediate inputs. It is shown that the gains from trade in intermediate and final goods exceeds that from trade in final goods alone. Falling trade and coordination costs result in an endogenous change in the structure of production towards a more fragmented structure, with corresponding implications for trade patterns.

Suggested Citation

  • Soo, Kwok Tong, 2018. "The gains from trade in intermediate goods: A Ricardo-Sraffa-Samuelson model," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 244-261.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:reveco:v:54:y:2018:i:c:p:244-261
    DOI: 10.1016/j.iref.2017.08.013
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1059056017306391
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.iref.2017.08.013?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Holger Görg & Aoife Hanley & Eric Strobl, 2008. "Productivity effects of international outsourcing: evidence from plant‐level data," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 41(2), pages 670-688, May.
    2. Robert C. Feenstra & Gene M. Grossman & Douglas A. Irwin (ed.), 1996. "The Political Economy of Trade Policy: Papers in Honor of Jagdish Bhagwati," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262061864, December.
    3. Susan HOUSEMAN, 2007. "Outsourcing, offshoring and productivity measurement in United States manufacturing," International Labour Review, International Labour Organization, vol. 146(1-2), pages 61-80, March.
    4. Elhanan Helpman & Marc J. Melitz & Stephen R. Yeaple, 2004. "Export Versus FDI with Heterogeneous Firms," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(1), pages 300-316, March.
    5. Paul A. Samuelson, 2001. "A Ricardo-Sraffa Paradigm Comparing Gains from Trade in Inputs and Finished Goods," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 39(4), pages 1204-1214, December.
    6. Ricardo, David, 1821. "On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation," History of Economic Thought Books, McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought, edition 3, number ricardo1821.
    7. Mary Amiti & Shang‐Jin Wei, 2009. "Service Offshoring and Productivity: Evidence from the US," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(2), pages 203-220, February.
    8. Feenstra, Robert C. & Hanson, Gordon H., 1997. "Foreign direct investment and relative wages: Evidence from Mexico's maquiladoras," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(3-4), pages 371-393, May.
    9. Teresa C. Fort, 2017. "Technology and Production Fragmentation: Domestic versus Foreign Sourcing," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 84(2), pages 650-687.
    10. Joseph A Clougherty & Michał Grajek, 2008. "The impact of ISO 9000 diffusion on trade and FDI: A new institutional analysis," Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 39(4), pages 613-633, June.
    11. Gene M. Grossman & Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, 2008. "Trading Tasks: A Simple Theory of Offshoring," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(5), pages 1978-1997, December.
    12. Kei-Mu Yi, 2003. "Can Vertical Specialization Explain the Growth of World Trade?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 111(1), pages 52-102, February.
    13. Ronald W. Jones, 2000. "Globalization and the Theory of Input Trade," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 026210086x, December.
    14. James E. Anderson & Eric van Wincoop, 2004. "Trade Costs," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 42(3), pages 691-751, September.
    15. Kalyan K. Sanyal & Ronald W. Jones, 2018. "The Theory of Trade in Middle Products," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: International Trade Theory and Competitive Models Features, Values, and Criticisms, chapter 13, pages 203-231, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    16. Andrés Rodríguez-Clare, 2010. "Offshoring in a Ricardian World," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 2(2), pages 227-258, April.
    17. Pol Antràs, 2003. "Firms, Contracts, and Trade Structure," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(4), pages 1375-1418.
    18. Gregory Mankiw, N. & Swagel, Phillip, 2006. "The politics and economics of offshore outsourcing," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(5), pages 1027-1056, July.
    19. James E. Rauch, 2001. "Business and Social Networks in International Trade," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 39(4), pages 1177-1203, December.
    20. Jonathan Eaton & Samuel Kortum, 2002. "Technology, Geography, and Trade," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(5), pages 1741-1779, September.
    21. Timothy J. Sturgeon, 2002. "Modular production networks: a new American model of industrial organization," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 11(3), pages 451-496, June.
    22. Karsten Bjerring Olsen, 2006. "Productivity Impacts of Offshoring and Outsourcing: A Review," OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers 2006/1, OECD Publishing.
    23. Brown, Clair & Linden, Greg, 2005. "Offshoring in the Semiconductor Industry: Historical Perspectives," Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, Working Paper Series qt0wv0k78t, Institute of Industrial Relations, UC Berkeley.
    24. Marc J. Melitz, 2003. "The Impact of Trade on Intra-Industry Reallocations and Aggregate Industry Productivity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 71(6), pages 1695-1725, November.
    25. Gene M. Grossman & Elhanan Helpman, 2002. "Integration versus Outsourcing in Industry Equilibrium," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 117(1), pages 85-120.
    26. Ethier, Wilfred J, 1982. "National and International Returns to Scale in the Modern Theory of International Trade," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 72(3), pages 389-405, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jiajie Yu & Shuang Meng, 2023. "How Does Trade Openness Affect Output Growth? A Perspective from the Input Diversity," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(11), pages 1-21, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kwok Tong Soo, 2014. "The gains from trade in intermediate goods," Working Papers 63719205, Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department.
    2. Lionel Fontagné & Ann Harrison, 2017. "The Factory-Free Economy. Outsourcing, Servitization, and the Future of Industry," PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) halshs-02923043, HAL.
    3. João Amador & Sónia Cabral, 2014. "Global Value Chains: Surveying Drivers, Measures and Impacts," Working Papers w201403, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.
    4. Elhanan Helpman, 2006. "Trade, FDI, and the Organization of Firms," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 44(3), pages 589-630, September.
    5. Pol Antràs & Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, 2009. "Organizations and Trade," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 1(1), pages 43-64, May.
    6. Mitra, Devashish & Ranjan, Priya, 2007. "Offshoring and Unemployment," IZA Discussion Papers 2805, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    7. Fabienne Rasel, 2017. "ICT and global sourcing – evidence for German manufacturing and service firms," Economics of Innovation and New Technology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 26(7), pages 634-660, October.
    8. Antrà s, Pol & Yeaple, Stephen R., 2014. "Multinational Firms and the Structure of International Trade," Handbook of International Economics, in: Gopinath, G. & Helpman, . & Rogoff, K. (ed.), Handbook of International Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 0, pages 55-130, Elsevier.
    9. Markusen, James, 2005. "Modeling the Offshoring of White-Collar Services: From Comparative Advantage to the New Theories of Trade and FDI," CEPR Discussion Papers 5408, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    10. Hatzigeorgiou, Andreas & Karpaty, Patrik & Kneller, Richard & Lodefalk, Magnus, 2016. "Immigrant Employment and the Contract Enforcement Costs of Offshoring," Working Papers 2016:7, Örebro University, School of Business, revised 01 Feb 2022.
    11. Wolfgang Keller & Stephen R. Yeaple, 2008. "Global Production and Trade in the Knowledge Economy," NBER Working Papers 14626, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Rosario Crinò, 2009. "Offshoring, Multinationals And Labour Market: A Review Of The Empirical Literature," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 23(2), pages 197-249, April.
    13. Matthew Cole & Robert Elliott & Toshihiro Okubo, 2014. "International environmental outsourcing," Review of World Economics (Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv), Springer;Institut für Weltwirtschaft (Kiel Institute for the World Economy), vol. 150(4), pages 639-664, November.
    14. Andrew B. Bernard & J. Bradford Jensen & Stephen J. Redding & Peter K. Schott, 2018. "Global Firms," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 56(2), pages 565-619, June.
    15. Schmerer, Hans-Jörg & Capuano, Stella & Egger, Hartmut & Koch, Michael, 2015. "Offshoring and Firm Overlap," VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy 113147, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    16. Hartmut Egger & Udo Kreickemeier & Jens Wrona, 2017. "Offshoring Domestic Jobs," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: International Trade and Labor Markets Welfare, Inequality and Unemployment, chapter 2, pages 27-70, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    17. Krolikowski, Pawel M. & McCallum, Andrew H., 2021. "Goods-market frictions and international trade," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 129(C).
    18. Markusen, James R., 2013. "Expansion of trade at the extensive margin: A general gains-from-trade result and illustrative examples," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(1), pages 262-270.
    19. Ann Harrison & John McLaren & Margaret S. McMillan, 2010. "Recent Findings on Trade and Inequality," NBER Working Papers 16425, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Richard Baldwin & Javier Lopez-Gonzalez, 2015. "Supply-chain Trade: A Portrait of Global Patterns and Several Testable Hypotheses," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(11), pages 1682-1721, November.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Intermediates trade; Comparative advantage; Structure of production;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • 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:eee:reveco:v:54:y:2018:i:c:p:244-261. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/620165 .

    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.