IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cor/louvrp/1542.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The importance of being small. Or when countries are areas and not points

Author

Listed:
  • THARAKAN , Joe
  • THISSE, Jacques-François

Abstract

Market size and transport costs are important ingredients of international trade. We propose to look at these issues from a different perspective. Using a Hotelling duopoly model with quadratic transport costs, we analyse the welfare effects of international trade between two countries that differ only in size. Our results indicate that in most cases free trade will lead to a decrease in prices. Furthermore, the firm of the small country will benefit from market expansion. Finally, the model predicts that the small country benefits from a move towards free trade whereas the opening to trade may hurt the large country.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • THARAKAN , Joe & THISSE, Jacques-François, 2002. "The importance of being small. Or when countries are areas and not points," LIDAM Reprints CORE 1542, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    • Handle: RePEc:cor:louvrp:1542
    DOI: 10.1016/S0166-0462(01)00084-9
    Note: In : Regional Science and Urban Economics, 32, 381-408, 2002
    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:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Alberto Alesina & Enrico Spolaore, 1997. "On the Number and Size of Nations," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 112(4), pages 1027-1056.
    2. Ohsawa, Yoshiaki, 1999. "Cross-border shopping and commodity tax competition among governments," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 33-51, January.
    3. James R. MARKUSEN, 2021. "Trade And The Gains From Trade With Imperfect Competition," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: BROADENING TRADE THEORY Incorporating Market Realities into Traditional Models, chapter 14, pages 303-323, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    4. Motta, Massimo, 1992. "Sunk Costs and Trade Liberalisation," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 102(412), pages 578-587, May.
    5. Krugman, Paul, 1980. "Scale Economies, Product Differentiation, and the Pattern of Trade," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 70(5), pages 950-959, December.
    6. Deardorff, Alan V., 1984. "Testing trade theories and predicting trade flows," Handbook of International Economics, in: R. W. Jones & P. B. Kenen (ed.), Handbook of International Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 10, pages 467-517, Elsevier.
    7. Schmitt, Nicolas, 1995. "Product Imitation, Product Differentiation and International Trade," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 36(3), pages 583-608, August.
    8. Greenhut,Melvin L. & Norman,George & Hung,Chao-Shun, 1987. "The Economics of Imperfect Competition," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521315647, September.
    9. Steven C. Salop, 1979. "Monopolistic Competition with Outside Goods," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 10(1), pages 141-156, Spring.
    10. T. Cordella, 1990. "Trade Liberalizaiton and Oligopolistic Industries: a Welfare Appraisal," Working Papers 100, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    11. Antonio Cabrales & Massimo Motta, 1996. "Country asymmetries, endogenous product choice and the speed of trade liberalization," Economics Working Papers 259, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Jan 1998.
    12. d'Aspremont, C & Gabszewicz, Jean Jaskold & Thisse, J-F, 1979. "On Hotelling's "Stability in Competition"," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 47(5), pages 1145-1150, September.
    13. Shachmurove, Yochanan & Spiegel, Uriel, 1995. "On Nations' Size and Transportation Costs," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 3(2), pages 235-243, June.
    14. Economides, Nicholas, 1984. "The principle of minimum differentiation revisited," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 24(3), pages 345-368, April.
    15. Tito CORDELLA, 1996. "On the possibility of a perverse effect of intra-industry trade," Discussion Papers (REL - Recherches Economiques de Louvain) 1996021, Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES).
    16. Greenhut,Melvin L. & Norman,George & Hung,Chao-Shun, 1987. "The Economics of Imperfect Competition," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521305525, September.
    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. Egger, Hartmut & Egger, Peter, 2007. "Outsourcing and trade in a spatial world," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(3), pages 441-470, November.
    2. Matsumura Toshihiro & Matsushima Noriaki, 2010. "When Small Firms Fight Back Against Large Firms in R&D Activities," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 10(1), pages 1-42, September.
    3. Gori, Giuseppe Francesco & Lambertini, Luca, 2013. "Trade liberalisation between asymmetric countries with environmentally concerned consumers," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(4), pages 549-560.
    4. Kai Andree & Mike Schwan, 2012. "Collusive Market Sharing with Spatial Competition," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 32(4), pages 3357-3364.
    5. Egger, Hartmut & Egger, Peter, 2010. "The trade and welfare effects of mergers in space," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(4), pages 210-220, July.
    6. Inoue, Tomohiro & Kamijo, Yoshio & Tomaru, Yoshihiro, 2009. "Interregional mixed duopoly," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 39(2), pages 233-242, March.
    7. Kevin Wiseman, 2010. "Location, Productivity, and Trade," 2010 Meeting Papers 671, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    8. Hong Feng & Jie Ma, 2018. "Location choices and third‐degree spatial price discrimination," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 65(2), pages 142-153, May.
    9. Tharakan, J., 2001. "Revisiting “On nations’ size and transportation costs”," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2001032, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    10. L. Lambertini, 2002. "the Specialization of Production and Labour Mobility Under Endogenous Differentiation," Working Papers 453, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    11. Octave Keutiben, 2018. "Exhaustible resources flows in a spatial context," Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences, Springer, vol. 11(1), pages 71-83, March.

    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. THARAKAN, Joe & THISSE, Jacques-François, 2000. "The importance of being small : size effects in international trade," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2000001, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    2. Tharakan, J., 2001. "Revisiting “On nations’ size and transportation costs”," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2001032, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    3. Pierre Picard & Takatoshi Tabuchi, 2010. "Self-organized agglomerations and transport costs," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 42(3), pages 565-589, March.
    4. José J. Sempere Monerris & Rafael Moner Colonques & Amparo Urbano Salvador, 2010. "Trade liberalization in vertically related markets," Working Papers. Serie AD 2010-09, Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie).
    5. Ottaviano, Gianmarco & Thisse, Jacques-Francois, 2004. "Agglomeration and economic geography," Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, in: J. V. Henderson & J. F. Thisse (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 58, pages 2563-2608, Elsevier.
    6. Cabrales, Antonio & Motta, Massimo, 1996. "Country Asymmetries, Endogenous Product Choice and the Speed of Trade Liberalization," CEPR Discussion Papers 1326, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    7. Graubner, Marten & Sexton, Richard J., 2021. "Spatial competition in agricultural procurement markets," 2021 Annual Meeting, August 1-3, Austin, Texas 313962, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    8. L. Lambertini, 2002. "the Specialization of Production and Labour Mobility Under Endogenous Differentiation," Working Papers 453, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    9. Jean-Marc Siroën, 1993. "Marchés contestables, différenciation des produits et discrimination des prix," Revue Économique, Programme National Persée, vol. 44(3), pages 569-592.
    10. Lindsey, Robin & West, Douglas S., 2003. "Predatory pricing in differentiated products retail markets," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 21(4), pages 551-592, April.
    11. Boris Hirsch & Marion König & Joachim Möller, 2013. "Is There a Gap in the Gap? Regional Differences in the Gender Pay Gap," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 60(4), pages 412-439, September.
    12. Borenstein, Severin & Netz, Janet, 1999. "Why do all the flights leave at 8 am?: Competition and departure-time differentiation in airline markets," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 17(5), pages 611-640, July.
    13. Yunus Aksoy & Hanno Lustig, 2007. "Exchange Rates, Prices And International Trade In A Model Of Endogenous Market Structure," Manchester School, University of Manchester, vol. 75(2), pages 160-192, March.
    14. Fujita, Masahisa & Thisse, Jacques-François, 2009. "New Economic Geography: An appraisal on the occasion of Paul Krugman's 2008 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 39(2), pages 109-119, March.
    15. Ralph Braid, 2014. "The socially optimal and equilibrium locations of two stores or libraries with consumer search," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 53(1), pages 123-136, August.
    16. Wen-Chung Guo & Fu-Chuan Lai, 2014. "Spatial competition with quadratic transport costs and one online firm," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 52(1), pages 309-324, January.
    17. Parenti, Mathieu & Ushchev, Philip & Thisse, Jacques-François, 2017. "Toward a theory of monopolistic competition," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 167(C), pages 86-115.
    18. Martin Peitz, 1999. "A difficulty with the address models of product differentiation," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 14(3), pages 717-727.
    19. Egger, Hartmut & Egger, Peter, 2007. "Outsourcing and trade in a spatial world," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(3), pages 441-470, November.
    20. Boyer, Marcel & Laffont, Jean-Jacques & Mahenc, Philippe & Moreaux, Michel, 1995. "Sequential Location Equilibria under Incomplete Information," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 6(2), pages 323-350, July.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F12 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Models of Trade with Imperfect Competition and Scale Economies; Fragmentation
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets

    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:cor:louvrp:1542. 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: Alain GILLIS (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/coreebe.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.