University
of Washington Tacoma
Geography of
International Trade
USEFUL LINKS
(please send suggestions of useful links to me)
See the UW
Libraries guide to resources for
this course.
Examples of comparative advantage research
Batra, A. and Khan, Z. 2005. Revealed
comparative advantage: an analysis for India and
China. Working
Paper 168. New Delhi: Indian Council for
Research International Economic Relations.
This paper makes use of several international
organizations' categorizations of economic
sectors based on relative factor intensity.
Shirotori, M., Tumurchudur, B., and Cadot,
O. 2010. Revealed factor intensity
indices at the product level. Policy
Issues in International Trade and Commodities
Study Series, No. 44. New York:
United Nations.
This paper creates indices for capital stock,
human capital stock, and arable land ratios (to
GDP) for 5 clusters of world countries (Section
2.2), and uses estimates of factor intensity of
products (section 3.2). The authors
caution that estimating factor intensities for
highly aggregated sectors (e.g., SITC 1-digit
sectors) is problematic:
Factor intensities vary
substantially not just between, but also
within industries, and this pattern remains at
all levels of disaggregation. For instance, an
industry sector, SITC 65 (textile yarns,
fabrics, made-up articles) covers a wide
variety of goods whose factor contents vary
from the least human/physical capital
intensive to the most capital intensive (table
24b). This suggests that analyses of the
factor content of trade, whether motivated by
the empirical validation of trade models or by
policy advice, should best be carried out at
high degrees of disaggregation [page 26].
Kowalski, P.
2011. Comparative Advantage and Trade
Performance: Policy Implications. OECD Trade
Policy
Papers No. 121. OECD
Publishing.
See pages 37-38 for graphical representation of
the relative skilled-labor, unskilled-labor,
capital, and energy intensities of economic
sectors.
|
copyright James W.
Harrington
revised 27 December 2013
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