North American Review of Economics and Finance最新文献

Since the early 1980s, the corpus of international trade theory has been broadened to include new theories of international trade based on “special assumptions”. While these models are often highly specific, they are starting to yield outcomes that appear to be more general, and which comport with what industry analysts report is going on in international markets, especially for manufactured goods. Further progress can be made if these models are able to take into account intellectual property and firm organization. This paper suggests how such factors impact policy analysis.

Legal rules governing the interconnection of customer-premises equipment (CPE) to the telephone network have economic implications for both producers and users of such equipment. The United States instituted a free-interconnection policy between 1968 and 1976; Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom adopted similar policies in the 1980s. A free-interconnection policy can impose costs on domestic producers as a result of increased competition among both foreign and domestic producers, but it can also provide benefits to domestic users who gain access to the world market in CPE. Interconnection rules can therefore provide a comparative advantage to countries that adopt the most favorable policy.

It is shown here that free interconnection has been a favorable policy for the United States. Costs to domestic CPE producers have been small, and benefits to large users appear to have been large, both in terms of increased product diversity and in terms of price and quality of established products. The movement toward free interconnection in other countries appears to be based on the favorable experience in the countries that have already made this change.

This CPE example suggests a generalization that can be expressed in terms of the “market for regulation” concept. It is suggested that an equilibrium in this market occurs at the point of maximum benefits minus costs, as experienced by the participants in this market. This equilibrium is a “rule equilibrium.” In the case of CPE, the old equilibrium was at the no interconnection point while the new equilibrium is at the free interconnection point toward which the world is presently moving.

The purpose of this paper is to review trends of the automotive industry in an international context and assess their impact on the Mexican automotive industry. The effect of technological transformations on the international location of production and the extent to which export potentials from Mexico should or could remain associated with domestic market achievements are two major concerns. A proper and realistic assessment of these issues from a Mexican perspective first requires delving into their implications for the U.S. auto industry and into the U.S. official policy for the automobile sector. At the end of the article, some suggestions are offered for long-term policies that will assist the development of the Mexican industry and will emphasize the need to anticipate technological changes and choose better-suited foreign partners.

Although many of the issues in North-American trade liberalization are reminiscent of those faced earlier by Europeans and by the United States and Canada, there are also some non-trivial differences. Divergences in economic structure are more pronounced. They affect the interplay of various sources of welfare gains and costs and are likely to make inter-industry and vertically integrated intra-industry trade more important Non-tariff barriers play a greater role in the present context and the welfare effects of preferntial elimination of quantitative restraints differ in important respect from those of tariffs. A free trade area, for example, which is clearly trade-diverting under tariff liberalization may be trade-creating under quantitative restrictions.

This paper uses an optimizing theoretical framework for modelling openness in the demand for money function for a small, open, developing economy; in so doing, it subsumes the ad hoc specifications of three previous studies. Its findings confirm the importance of a measure of openness in the money demand specification for Barbados. More specifically, it appears that transactions associated with the traded sector of the economy exhibit greater elasticity of money demand than those associated with the nontraded sector.