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From the formation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1948, to the ending of the ill-fated Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) in 2017, United States' leaders of both political parties have encouraged international trade. This paper examines four policy changes since GATT that may provide future solutions: Japan's Voluntary Export Restraints in 1981, the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, China's entrance into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, and the termination of the TPP in 2017. Despite a repeated negative trade balance, the percentage of trade in the GDP has been very meaningful to the U. S. economy. In an inspection of trade winners and losers, certain industries have done very well. The overall tradable sector has declined, while the non-tradable sector has seen very significant growth. One problem is that tradable industries pay workers more than their service counterparts, but face an unfulfilled need for trained workers. Multinational firms (MFN's) have prospered. Small firms, employing semi-skilled workers and supplying those MFN's have disappeared. Also as the United States wrestles with immigration, the semi-skilled jobs that the new entrants to the U.S. could have expected historically are gone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newly elected U.S. President Donald J. Trump has ushered in a new but debated era of global economic repositioning in which trade policies, particularly those pertaining to manufacturing, may drastically change in the form of new tariffs or renegotiated agreements. This era, which might be termed the Washington- Nationalist Ambivalence, may greatly affect the business environment for managers. At the same time, the world is witnessing a greater divergence of economic policy between developed and emerging nations. In light of this fact, do any of the President's ideas meet the test of economic theory, traditional or modern? This paper combines micro- and macroeconomics with an understanding of business and market share, through several related models. Specifically, it uses concepts from orthodox trade theory, as well as comprehensible evidence from the 1970s-1980s auto and manufacturing battles, to propose an original concept that, under certain circumstances beyond the "optimal tariff," tariffs in competitive industries with low import market shares are justified. Managers might appeal these ideas to the Trump administration. In addition, the paper proffers a new measurement called "choice purchasing power" to reconcile global trade divergences, which future research could validate, while offering a lukewarm hypothesized hope that the new U.S. administration will heed such reasonable policies and turn away from many of the flagrant misnomers made during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objectives of this article are to assess changes in the international competitiveness of the forest products industries in three countries (Sweden, the US, and Ukraine) during the years preceding, during, and after the recent economic crisis. To deepen the exploration of the three countries’ competitiveness, we propose a Cross-Country Relative Competitiveness Index. The results show that comprehensive measurement of comparative and competitive advantages is essential for determining why a given industry in a given country is doing well or badly. They also provide broad background information for subsequent, more detailed explorations of important changes and trends. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses a computable model of trade to forecast the effects of the US–Korea free trade agreement on the manufacturing sector. The model uses the Eaton–Kortum methodology to explain intra-industry trade instead of the usual Armington assumption. It is parameterized using 2005 data for 15 industries and 53 countries. The results show that implementing KORUS would increase the US manufacturing exports to Korea by 56.9% and Korean manufacturing exports to the US by 18.9%. It would also increase manufacturing employment by 26,500 jobs in Korea and 34,200 jobs in the US. In addition, KORUS would lead to significant changes in the patterns of trade and production. The US and Korea would increase their specialization in the industries where they have strong technological comparative advantages. Finally, KORUS would increase welfare in both countries, but only modestly: by 0.27% in Korea and 0.013% in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines revealed comparative advantage and competitiveness of Australia and several other dairy exporting countries in processed dairy products, using Balassa's revealed comparative advantage index and Vollrath's revealed competitive advantage indexes, and actual export data for the period 1990-2001. The results demonstrate that Australia has revealed comparative advantage and revealed competitive advantage of all of the dairy products. New Zealand, and the selected EU countries have revealed comparative and competitive advantage in most of the dairy products. The UK and the USA have revealed comparative disadvantage in most of the dairy products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of mainstream economists believe that globalization and trade liberalization have had a minor role in increasing U.S. wage inequality. A minority argues that capital mobility and outsourcing indicate a larger effect. This paper first surveys these views, and then argues that how we understand the policy consequences of trade liberalization helps determine the character our analysis of the issue itself. Thus, a shift in policy perspective, to consider the "equity costs" of trade liberalization in terms of eroded U.S. labor market institutions, produces a larger framework for analyzing the consequences of globalization and trade liberalization than is available in traditional comparative advantage efficiency reasoning. From this wider perspective, trade liberalization has likely had a greater impact on U.S. wage inequality than even the minority mainstream position allows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses 4-digit SITC data to identify groups of manufactured goods exported from China to the USA that have strong or rising comparative advantages. We find that most of the trades are inter-industry, with only a small portion being vertical intra-industry trades (IIT). Our results confirm that Sino-US trade is complementary. We construct an imbalanced index of IIT, and identify the goods groups that aggravate and reduce the US trade deficit with China. We suggest an approach for calculating a dynamic IIT index that might mitigate the aggregation bias of the existing methodologies. Our improved index reveals that the dynamic imbalances of US-Chinese IIT in manufactured goods are worse than their static IIT imbalances, which means that it would be difficult to correct the deficit of US trade with China in the following couple of years. Adjusting and improving the structures of industries and products is China's major task for sustainable trade growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains, in terms of Galbraith's ‘conventional wisdom’ and ‘innocent fraud’ of mainstream economics, why the U.S. economy has experienced significant backsliding from the degree of progress our economic policies and institutions made toward producing a civilized economic society. It then sets out policy proposals for making progress toward a twenty-first-century ‘good society.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration and trade are often linked through ethnic networks boosting bilateral trade. This study uses migration to quantify the importance of Ricardian technology differences for international trade. The framework provides the first panel estimates connecting country-industry productivity and exports, and the study exploits heterogeneous technology diffusion from immigrant communities in the United States for identification. The latter instruments are developed by combining panel variation on the development of new technologies across US cities with historical settlement patterns for migrants from countries. The instrumented elasticity of export growth on the intensive margin with respect to the exporter's productivity growth is between 1.6 and 2.4, depending upon weighting. This provides an important contribution to the trade literature of Ricardian advantages, and it establishes a connection of migration to home country exports beyond bilateral networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper examines international trade issues as vital indicators of the economic prospects of the United States and other developed economies. In particular, it challenges misuses of the doctrine of mutual gains from trade and instead argues that comparative advantage does not guarantee increases in benefits to both trading partners—especially when one partner seeks to distort the market mechanism in its favor. In the face of such mercantilist or protectionist practices, efforts to advance innovation, without retaining manufacturing jobs, will not ensure continued prosperity, as the number of jobs entailed in the invention process is small compared with the number of jobs associated with manufacturing an innovative product for mass consumption. These matters call for the urgent rethinking of trade policy by the United States and other developed nations, if they are to balance their imports and exports and ensure continued economic growth. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Civil society organisations (CSOs) have a prominent role in global health initiatives such as The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (the Global Fund) and, in the United States, the President''s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). They are increasingly consulted by international organisations and, in some cases like the Global Fund, are involved in decision-making. They are also increasingly seen as crucial agents in delivering health interventions on the ground. Some donors prefer to channel funds through CSOs in developing countries than through perceived to be corrupt or inefficient government agencies. This paper examines this growing role and the arguments put forward to justify their increasing influence, particularly in HIV/AIDS initiatives. It analyses the main challenges to CSOs'' legitimacy and outlines key responses to these challenges. It concludes by suggesting a number of research priorities that might help to evaluate the impact of CSOs in global health initiatives. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Policy analysis matrices are developed and used to derive domestic resource cost coefficients for different catfish farm production regions in the United States. The results show that U.S. catfish producers were losing their comparative advantage positions during the study period considered. An import tariff improves the industry's comparative advantage position, but may not increase its market profitability. Higher efficiency in feed usage, and higher market prices paid to producers through promotional efforts are essential to the U.S. catfish industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which U.S. institutions of higher education offer the best value to consumers? To answer this question, we evaluate U.S. institutions relative to a data envelopment analysis (DEA) multi-factor frontier based on 2000-2001 data for 1,179 4-year institutions. The resulting DEA 'best buy' scores allow the ranking of institutions by a weighted sum of institutional characteristics per dollar of average net price. The net price is calculated as tuition, fees, room, and board less per student financial aid. Institutional characteristics include SAT score, athletic expenditures, instructional expenditures, value of buildings, dorm capacity, and student body characteristics. The DEA scores indicate the distance of each institution from the 'best buy' frontier for the chosen characteristics, providing an objective means of ranking institutions as the best values in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the industry dimension into the Eaton-Kortum model of trade. Industries are linked with each other by domestic and international trade in intermediate goods. The model is parametrized using data for eight industries in 1989. It is used to perform several counterfactual simulations that are relevant to today's policy debates. First, the model is used to study the effects of the US–EU trade wars. It is found that trade wars have a greater negative effect on countries with large initial net export positions. It is also found that some trade war scenarios are more beneficial to the US while others to the EU. Second, the model is used to study the effects of trade barrier reductions between the high-income and middle-income countries. The results show that this trade liberalization tends to reinforce the pattern of trade according to technological comparative advantages. The results also show which industries should be targeted for barrier reductions depending on policy goals. The third set of simulations investigates spillovers from the technological growth in the US machinery industry. The results show how geography, technology, and industry links affect the propagation of this growth across countries and industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyzed India's export competitiveness in the textiles and clothing (T&C) sector in the United States. The T&C industry is traditionally important for the Indian economy due to its significant contribution to export, employment, and industrial production. However, the competition in the global T&C market intensified after the Multi-Fiber Arrangement phase-out in 2005. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the export competitiveness of India's T&C sector in the U.S., India's largest export destination and one of the world's largest consumers of T&C. In this study, we calculated the comparative advantage of India's T&C based on Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA), Market Comparative Advantage (MCA), and Comparative Advantage by Countries (CAC). Our analysis shows that India had a comparative advantage in the T&C sector in the U.S. from 1991 to 2017, despite intensified competition in the global market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]