Tag Archives: Comparative Advantage

Two hundred years ago, with a simple yet profound example about England trading cloth for Portuguese wine, David Ricardo introduced the Principle of Comparative Advantage. In this eBook, leading trade policy analysts examine whether Ricardo’s insights remain valid in a world where services as well as good cross borders as does data and technology, where there is a rising China whose growth is heavily dependent on exports, and in the face of a backlash against globalisation.PDF Download...

Brad DeLong shows how Ricardo's version of economic liberalism based on free trade explained by comparative advantage is bourgeois liberalism that enriches the ownership class. Washington Center for Equitable Growth Ricardo’s Big Idea, and Its Vicissitudes Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley

Sooo…I have a bit of a confession to make- I’ve established a bit of a cottage industry tutoring students in the course I taught while I was in grad school. Not gonna lie, it’s pretty nice to be seen as an advocate as opposed to the thing between the student and the grade that the student wants, in part because students are more willing to admit what they find confusing to me than to their “real” instructors. As a related project, I figured it would make sense to create videos for the items...

Maintaining the core-periphery dichotomy of imperialism and colonialism under neoliberalism, Neo-imperialism, and neocolonialism. The Political Economy of DevelopmentThe ‘organised hypocrisy’ of US industrial policyNick Johnson

I include the odd useful and relevant neoclassical work too. I will update on a regular basis:Baiman, R. 2010. “The Infeasibility of Free Trade in Classical Theory: Ricardo’s Comparative Advantage Parable has No Solution,” Review of Political Economy 22.3: 419–437.Bairoch, Paul. 1993. Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes. Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York and London.Brewer, A. 1985. “Trade with Fixed Real Wages and Mobile Capital,” Journal of International Economics 18:...

Last weekend, as a result of Brad DeLong's post on free trade, we had a brief Twitter exchange. He had suggested that the Heckscher-Ohlin (HO) model* implies gains from trade associated to comparative advantage. He went further and suggested, after I implied that the Methuen Treaty between England and Portugal had not been favorable to the latter, that Portugal had indeed benefited greatly from free trade.It is important to note, before we get to Portugal, that the HO model, which is a...

[embedded content] From CAPITALISM the documentary by Ilan Ziv. In this short clip a discussion of comparative advantage and its limitations, with Pascal Lamy, Robert Boyer and yours truly (many others in this chapter, including Geoff Hodgson and Ha-Joon Chang).The Mexican secretary of finance that appears in the video is actually NOT talking about the Ricardian model of trade, which at least given its assumptions is logically correct, but about the neoclassical or Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson...