uncertainty as a possible rationale for customs unions abstract two commodity price taking countries which face uncertainty about world commodity prices and domestic output can when asset markets are incomplete gain relative to free trade by forming a customs union once the customs union is formed these countries have an incentive to pursue unilateral commercial policies which may undermine the collective gains brought about by the customs union

precautionary saving in the small and in the large the theory of precautionary saving is shown to be isomorphic to the arrow pratt theory of risk aversion making possible the application of a large body of knowledge about risk aversion to precautionary saving and more generally to the theory of optimal choice under risk in particular a measure of the strength of the precautionary saving motive analogous to the arrow pratt measure of risk aversion is used to establish a number of new propositions about precautionary saving and to give a new interpretation of the dreze modigliani substitution effect copyright 1990 by the econometric society

informational asymmetries strategic behavior and industrial organization one of the most active and exciting areas of economic research over the last several years has been the use of noncooperative games of incomplete information to model industrial competition this work has yielded not only a remarkable number of papers but also several new insights on and explanations of fundamentally important issues the purpose of this paper is to attempt an appreciation and evaluation of this work because most of our individual and joint work since about 1979 has been in this mode it will come as no surprise that we are proponents of this line of research however there are several questions and potential problems that we see as arising in connection with this methodology and we will attempt to address these first a disclaimer we are not attempting a survey of the applications of asymmetric information games aig to industrial organization although we will refer in a highly selective fashion to a number of prominent strands in this literature in particular where any references are provided at all they are typically only to the earliest contributions to a subject even more we do not deal with work in which informational asymmetries are important but the analysis is not game theoretic for example search and price dispersion or the early work on the lemons problem and on moral hazard and adverse selection in insurance markets or with game theoretic treatments that assume complete information i aig methods and applications

the direction of developing country trade empirical evidence of differences between south south and south north trade abstract declining market opportunities in northern markets led to views that greater south south trading might provide an alternative growth stimulus this paper analyses the characteristics of south south trade in manufactures and recent changes in the level of such trade to help clarify the potential of greater self reliance within the south south south trade is found to be more intensive in the use of both physical and human capital hence less rational from the static comparative advantage viewpoint than south north trade there is indirect but strong evidence that exporting countries with greatest orientation towards the south are those with greater distortions less rapid movements up the ladder of comparative advantage and weaker export performance finally it is observed that the recent boom in south south trade is largely explained by simple market size effects very rapid growth of rich oil exporters and the faster gnp growth of developing compared to developed countries the paper concludes that while south south trade of about the present magnitude one of greater developing country exports is certainly rational there is little evidence to support views that greater south south trade should be especially promoted arguments of dynamic comparative advantage may favor south south trade but so far these have been more speculative and not yet well researched empirically

learning and the time interdependence of costa rican exports abstract exports may enhance learning through production induced learning by doing learning to export by doing and flows of information from customers we provide evidence on the learning effects of export destination for costa rica for 1955 through 1980 we examine granger causality results and export trends to determine relationships between exports to the central american common market cacm the rest of the south and the north increasing exports to the cacm appear to promote learning in machinery leather and intermediate manufactures we also find that the cacm redirects some exports away from northern markets probably with damaging consequences

pricing and financial resources an analysis of the disk drive industry 1980 88 this paper empirically examines the long purse hypothesis formalized by patrick bolton and david scharfstein 1990 that incumbents may drive out entrants through aggressive pricing the author analyzes the pricing of 733 disk drives between 1980 and 1988 drives that are adjacent to those manufactured by thinly capitalized undiversified rivals are priced lower than other drives during the later years in the sample when little equity financing was available to these firms the results are robust to controls for alternative hypotheses and to other specifications of the hedonic regression copyright 1995 by mit press

determinants of the structure of u s foreign trade 1958 1976 abstract the heckscher ohlin model with three direct factor inputs is borne out for u s net exports of manufactures in annual cross section regressions for 1958 1976 the coefficient on unskilled labor became significantly more negative over the period and there is evidence that the negative sign on physical capital may reflect the inclusion of natural resource industries further analysis based upon 1960 and 1970 census years suggests the importance as well of skill and technological variables calculations of the total factor requirements of u s trade uphold the leontief paradox for 1958 but not for 1972

export led growth and structural change evidence from malaysia many studies have tried to establish the causal link between export expansion and economic growth this contribution is to recognize that structural changes will change the sources of growth and this will affect the export growth relationship a country case study approach is used focusing on malaysia a country with one of the world s highest sustained growth rates and a long history of commodity trade we use var analysis of malaysian quarterly trade and gdp growth from 1965 to 1996 trade data are disaggregated into primary and manufactures exports and causality tests are applied to the entire period as well as two subperiods 150 the 1965 1501980 period when policy emphasis was on import substitution and the 1981 1501996 period when policies favoured export led growth statistical tests confirm export led growth for the full period and for the period to 1980 but tests on the 1981 1501996 period show growth causing exports primary exports had a stronger direct impact on economic growth than manufactu

exports and growth is the export led growth hypothesis valid for provincial economies this paper re examines the export led growth hypothesis using provincial data unlike other studies that concentrate on country level data this study investigates the validity of the hypothesis for four largest provinces in korea seoul kyunggee kyungnam and pusan the causal implication of the export led growth hypothesis is generally supported for all provinces in the sample the framework of analysis is two and four variable autoregressive models that include provincial exports provincial output terms of trade and national output shocks granger causal orderings from exports to output growth are generally supported in bivariate causal models in multivariate models variance decompositions and impulse response functions further indicate that export growth has a significant impact on output growth for all provinces although a feedback effect from output to export growth appears in seoul and the kyungnam province

litigation and the value of tobacco companies this study determines how the recent wave of litigation affected returns and systematic risk in the tobacco industry we test for changes in stock prices coinciding with litigation announcements using a difference in difference event study methodology unfavorable information concerning litigation reduced tobacco returns we find a decline in systematic risk as traditionally measured by the covariance between industry returns and returns to a diversified efficient portfolio this decline may imply a substantial decline in the cost of equity capital of at least 2 2 after the period of litigation which we attribute to common cost shocks experienced by the companies participating in the master settlement agreement combined with the oligopolistic structure of the industry

causality between export growth and industrial development empirical evidence from the nics a comment abstract in a recent article chow 1987 argued that his empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that export growth causes industrial development in this comment i point out several serious shortcomings of chow s analysis

predatory pricing and the acquisition cost of competitors this paper investigates whether predatory price cutting reduces a trust s cost of acquiring its competitors a variant of the litzenberger rao valuation model is estimated with the expenditures for 43 rival firms purchased by the old american tobacco company between 1891 and 1906 the coefficient estimates indicate that ceteris paribus alleged predation significantly lowered the acquisition costs of the tobacco trust both for asserted victims and through reputation effects for competitors that sold out peacefully although qualified by data limitations these results support the classical view of predatory pricing as a systematic business practice

export instability and the domestic economy questions of causality the conventional view concerning the impact of export instability on the domestic economies of developing countries is one of pessimism export instability is thought to adversely affect the short run stability and longer run growth of income empirical evidence on these matters is however inconclusive this article applies a granger sims reduced form approach to examining whether export instability generates short run instability in domestic income for each of a sample of 20 trade dependent countries the results obtained strongly support the contention that export instability induces short run macroeconomic instability

the permanent income hypothesis estimation and testing by instrumental variables the permanent income hypothesis with rational expectation is restated estimated and tested by an instrumental variables technique on the postwar u s aggregate time series data the hypothesis is accepted on a consumption series which includes service flows from consumer durables if the consumption series is the one in the national income and product accounts the hypothesis is decisively rejected an explanation is suggested to reconcile the conflicting test results

government spending and consumer attitudes toward risk time preference and intertemporal substitution an econometric analysis we construct a model that considers the direct effects if any of government spending on the attitudes of a typical consumer toward risk time preference and intertemporal substitution the null hypothesis is that a growing government sector does not affect the consumer s behavior and the alternative is that it causes him to become less risk averse more impatient to consume now rather than in the future and less responsive to changes in real interest rates if the alternative hypothesis is correct then government growth may lead to lower economic growth using greek annual aggregate data 1960 1990 we can reject the null hypothesis

the direction of trade past and present and the learning effects of exports to different directions abstract this paper looks at the direction of trade in manufacturer the pattern predicted by the hos model hasn r materialized but some sense of the historical pattern is made by looking at the distribution of world income as well as exporting countries policies and product composition given the historical pattern and in particular the direction of japan s trade it is argued that developing countries today are under exporting to one another this is to their detriment insofar as trade among less developed countries teends to be comprised of manufactures that are skill and learning intensive the scope for an increase in such trade is assessed

exports imports and economic growth in south korea and japan a tale of two economies this article investigates the relationship between exports imports and economic growth for south korea and japan by constructing a vector autoregression var model causality is examined between real gross domestic product gdp real exports and real imports several principal results emerge from the empirical work first the three variables are cointegrated for both countries implying that a long run steady state exists second there is evidence of bidirectional causality between imports and economic growth for both countries finally japan seems to experience export led growth while gdp growth in south korea has a negative effect on export growth these contrasting findings could result from export goods in japan exhibiting greater nonprice competitive aspects although their success fails to trigger a virtuous circle since growth fails to lead to increased exports while for south korea output growth leads to a decrease in export growth suggesting a strong domestic market

the long run impact of foreign shocks to the austrian economy an analysis at a sectoral level this paper investigates the long run impact of foreign shocks on the austrian economy which is an example of a small open economy with a fixed echange rate regime the analysis is done in a multisectoral vector autoregression framework foreign shocks involve inovations in gnp of european oecd countries oil prices effective echange rate and interest rates sectoral responses appear to be very different in particular shocks to european oecd gnp have a high long run impact on sectoral output especially in export dependent sectors this supports the hypothesis of export led growth

predation by public enterprises abstract this paper demonstrates that in addition to the usual niskanen type losses generated by excess production by public firms there is an unrecognized second type of loss in order to sell their excess production public firms have to price their output below the competitive price and thereby cause more efficient firms at the margin to be eliminated the discussion is then extended to include the case where public enterprises finance additional expansions of output by price discriminating against inframarginal customers but then face the threat of competition for these inframarginal customers from new potential entry public enterprises are further shown to provide more credible threats to potential entrants since unlike private firms they value the increased output associated with predation and not merely the higher future benefits produced by it

the validity of the elg hypothesis in the mena region cointegration and error correction model analysis the export led growth elg hypothesis is examined for nine middle east and north africa mena countries in three variable vector autoregressive and error correction models when considering total exports the results reject the elg hypothesis in almost all of these countries when only manufactured exports are examined no support is found for elg in countries with relatively low shares of manufactured exports in total merchandise exports but strong support in countries with relatively high shares these findings suggest that promoting exports may contribute to economic growth only after a certain threshold of manufactured exports has been reached

unit roots and cointegration in estimating causality between exports and economic growth empirical evidence from the asean countries abstract this paper utilizes cointegration and error correction representation methodology in estimating the long run behavioral relationship between exports and economic growth in the asean countries

trade as the engine of growth in developing countries revisited economic growth in developed countries since the mid 1970s the only way to keep the engine of ldc growth beating at a satisfactory rate so the argument goes is to turn to an alternative source of fuel this lewis argues lies in trade among the developing countries which he asserts can take up the slack left by mdcs more developed countries as mdcs slow down 1980 p 560 pessimism about demand for ldc exports in developed countries markets is a recurrent theme in the development literature also familiar is the approach taken by lewis to dismiss past successes of ldcs in world trade by declaring the alleged engine of past growth to be no longer operating satisfactorily the intellectual foundations of the import substitution strategy laid in the 1950s by prebisch myrdal and most importantly nurkse rested on similar grounds arguing that the demand for periphery countries exports in the 20th century is far weaker than it was in the 19th century trade was dismissed as an engine of growth a function nurkse alleged it had served in the 19th century the solution prescribed in the 1950s was to look inward in effect to scrap the trade engine altogether lewis remedy coming two decades later when most importsubstitution possibilities in many ldcs have been all but exhausted retains the trade engine but seeks an alternative source of fuel to drive it the classic critique by irving kravis 1970 of nurkse s thesis of trade as a faltering engine of growth showed that export expansion did not serve in the nineteenth century to differentiate successful from unsuccessful countries p 850 this followed from two findings first that successful 19th century countries showed few signs of export dominated growth second that unsuccessful periphery countries enjoyed export expansion in the second half of the 19th century of the same order of magnitude as the temperate regions of recent settlement this led kravis to conclude that a more warranted metaphor

the need for industrial policy in ldc s a re statement of the infant industry argument this paper presents a learning by doing model of a small open economy learning acquired in production of an industry x enhances productivity of industries x and y by introducing dynamic production complementarities across industries through the learning curve this approach presents an important generalization of p k bardhan s 1971 model copyright 1987 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

profiting from induced changes in competitors market values the case of entry and entry deterrence the authors resurrects an idea due to j hirshleifer 1971 by examining how one firm might profit by trading in the securities of other firms whose values are dependent upon the first firm s actions they focus on the case of entry can an entrant profit from trading in the securities of an incumbent firm and how does the availability of such trading profits affect the economics of entry and entry deterrence the authors results have implications for antitrust policy insider trading rules the williams act short selling rules whether companies should be publicly or privately held and the degree of diversification for companies copyright 1995 by blackwell publishing ltd

an empirical investigation of the causal relationship between openness and economic growth in china this study investigates the causal relationship between openness and economic growth in china the integration and cointegration properties of the data are analysed and the models of granger sims geweke and hsiao are used to identify a bi directional causal relationship between gnp and exports plus imports this bi directional causation is consistent with china s development strategy of protected export promotion

when does predation dominate collusion i study repeated competition among oligopolists the only novelty is that firms may go bankrupt and permanently exit the probability that a firm survives a price war depends on its financial strength which varies stochastically over time under some conditions including no entry an anti folk theorem holds when firms are patient so that strength levels change relatively quickly every nash equilibrium involves an immediate price war that lasts until at most one firm remains surprisingly the possibility of entry may facilitate collusion as may impatience the model can explain some observed patterns of collusion and predation

the economic case for international labour standards this paper explores the economic case for international labour standards granting workers rights of free association and collective bargaining confers both static and dynamic economic efficiencies static efficiencies refer to one time gains from improvements in economic practice dynamic efficiencies refer to gains from improvements to the growth path resulting from a shift away from a low road development path to a high road path these efficiencies raise wages employment and output in developing countries and they can also benefit workers in developed countries labour standards are an institutional mechanism for raising the quality of growth in both developing and developed countries in this sense they are a win win institution

trade policy and distortions in intra asian trade this paper analysis wheather the level of tariffs and non tariff barriers affect the pattern of inter industry trade within asia the heckscher ohlin theorem is based on the assumption of efficient resource allocation however markets in many developing countries protect the domestic production by trade barriers we would therefore expect the pattern of production and trade not to reflect comparative advantages perfectly it is found that import charges and non tariff barriers have a significant positive impact on capital intensities in net export

does government growth reduce precautionary saving the paper extends the constant relative risk aversion model by endogenizing the arrow pratt coefficient of relative risk aversion the empirical application treats this coefficient as a linear function of the rate of growth of real government expenditure per worker and estimates a euler equation for consumption using greek annual aggregate data for the period 1960 1993 the results support the view that government growth may cause a typical consumer to become less risk averse and save less

antitrust predation and the antitrust paradox abstractthe widely recognized influence that the chicago school of law and economics had on the institution of antitrust is nowhere more apparent than in predatory pricing law starting with aaron director this movement had many distinguished contributors but even in this company robert bork stands out for his part in persuading the judiciary to refocus antitrust law on the interests of consumers rather than on the interests of competing firms in the antitrust paradox and other writings bork advanced the chicago school insight that the kind of aggressive price cutting that at the time passed for predatory pricing is instead an essential and for consumers beneficial attribute of competition the resulting change in direction that antitrust has taken in predatory pricing cases culminated in the court s matsushita matsushita electric industrial co v zenith ratio corp 475 u s 574 1986 and brooke group brooke group ltd v brown williamson tobacco corp 509 u s 209 1993 opinions both

3 3 theory of customs unions abstract four recent models those of berglas corden meade and riezman which have extended the theory of customs union to 3 3 dimensions are reviewed the reasons for both apparent and real differences among the welfare propositions from these models are explained some new extensions are derived the main conclusions are that the family of 3 3 models introduce several effects which cannot be present in 3 2 models and that the distinctions among the models are due mostly to diverse assumptions concerning the trilateral pattern of trade which are not readily apparent

causality between export growth and industrial development empirial evidence from the nics abstract this paper investigates the causal relationship between export growth and industrial development in eight newly industrializing countries nics results of sims causality test show that for most of the nics there is a strong bidirectional causality between the growth of exports and industrial development these findings support the export led growth strategy in that expansion in exports not only promote the growth of national income but also lead to structural transformation of the developing countries

predation reputation and entry deterrence abstract economists often argue that predatory practices are irrational since there exist cheaper or more certain means to gain or maintain a monopoly our gametheoretic equilibrium analysis suggests that if a firm is threatened by several potential entrants then predation may be rational against early entrants even if it is costly when viewed in isolation because it yields a reputation which deters other entrants asymmetric information plays a crucial role in our analysis since it provides the rationale for entrants to base their expectations of the firm s future behavior on its past actions the analysis also suggests methods to treat general reputational phenomena

exports growth and causality in developing countries abstract previous empirical studies have interpreted results in regressions of output variables on export variables as providing support for an export promotion development strategy such an interpretation is questionable since these regressions provide no means of determining the direction of causality this paper performs causality tests between exports and growth for 37 developing countries the results cast considerable doubt on the validity of the export promotion hypothesis

predation mergers and incomplete information this article examines the strategic pricing of duopolists in anticipation of a takeover of one by the other in equilibrium the acquiring firm may expand its output to signal that it is a low cost rival and thereby improve the takeover terms if the merged firm willface potential entry a premerger expansion of output may be necessary to deter entry and to make the merger profitable in that case the acquiringjirm s output expansion increases industry concentration by facilitating the takeover and by deterring entry this establishes the rationality of predatory output expansions even when a merger or a takeover is possible and indeed anticipated a voluminous literature is devoted to exploring the role of pricing in altering industry structure to achieve monopoly power that literature discusses both price cutting to drive existing rivals from the industry predatory pricing and setting low prices to deter potential entrants limit pricing the former has received the lion s share of the attention of antitrust commentators and enforcers but the rationality of predatory pricing has been seriously questioned the major criticism has two parts i takeovers are a superior means of achieving monopoly power and where legal should therefore be used instead of price cutting and ii if a takeover is anticipated premerger price cutting merely dissipates some of the value of the merging parties and would thus be irrational the first argument was originally advanced by mcgee 1958 and later by telser 1965 and bork 1978 the essential idea is that since predation is costly firms should realize that a more profitable arrangement in the form of a merger exists and ought to be negotiated the second argument is a natural extension of the first in response to this criticism yamey 1972 provides two arguments first the aggressor knows that he may face other rivals in the future entrants into this or other markets those potential rivals may draw inferences from his current behavior about the response they will face if they enter in that case the aggressor may wish to develop a reputation for aggressive behavior second even if a takeover is anticipated the terms of the takeover may be affected by the pretakeover pricing

exports and economic growth in industrialized countries the prima facie causal relationships between growth exports and factor inputs capital and labour are investigated in five industrialized countries germany itlay japan united kingdom and united states over the period 1960 87 by analysing a four variable vector autoregressive var model for each country our results indicate that germany and japan experienced export led growth reverse causality between exports and growth is found in the case of the us and uk while to causal relationship between exports and output is found for itlay

sensitivity of consumption to income and to government purchases some specification and estimation issues the paper derives a nonlinear error correction model ecm for consumption and shows that existing models that are based on quadratic utility combine permanent income and current income consumption and nest or could nest the hypothesis of substitutability between private consumption and government purchases are special cases of the ecm the importance of some econometric issues that have not received proper attention in the literature is demonstrated by estimating the models using us aggregate quarterly data 1953 1 1992 4 the evidence suggests that the ecm produces more reliable estimates than do the existing restrictive models

predation and its rate of return the sugar industry 1887 1914 we show that the price wars following two major entry episodes were predatory our proof is twofold by direct comparison of price to marginal cost and by construction of a lower bound to predicted competitive price cost margins that we show to exceed observed margins predation occurred only when its relative cost to the dominant firm the american sugar refining company asrc was small its most clear effect was to lower the acquisition price of entrants and small incumbents it may also have deterred future capacity additions and raised asrc s share of industry profits predation operated by strengthening asrc s reputation as a willing predator

the general validity of the heckscher ohlin theorem despite a number of attempts to extend it the heckscher ohlin theorem remains woefully restricted in terms of the generality of the assumptions needed for its proof in its traditional form as a statement about the commodity composition of trade the theorem is valid only in the highly abstract environment of the two factor two good twocountry model that has been the mainstay of trade theory for half a century a weaker version of the theorem involving the factor content of trade rather than its commodity composition has been proved for any number of factors goods and countries but this generality has so far been bought only at the cost of other and perhaps equally restrictive assumptions 2 the purpose of this paper is to provide statements and proofs of the heckscher ohlin h o theorem that are more general than those currently available the approach taken is similar to that used in my 1980 article for an extension of the theory of comparative advantage in terms of correlations between autarky prices and trade in section i i lay out the assumptions on which the analysis is based these assumptions provide the outlines of a reasonably general model in which there may be any numbers of goods and factors and in which factor prices may be equalized or not trade impediments in the form of tariffs or export taxes are permitted though transportation costs are not 3 in section ii i discuss the difficulty of inferring the factor content of trade in a world of unequal factor prices and i provide several alternative definitions of that concept for use later in the paper these together with the assumptions of section i are used in section iii to prove a theorem on the value at autarky prices of the factor content of trade in section iv this theorem is used to prove a first corollary that makes a more direct statement about the pattern of trade it says that worldwide there must be a negative correlation between the factor content of trade by factor and country and the corresponding autarky factor prices it is precisely these autarky factor prices that constitute the ohlin measure of factor scarcity therefore the corollary provides a formal statement of the general idea that countries tend to export the services of those factors which they have in relative abundance and it may be regarded as a generalization of the factor content version of the h o theorem finally a generalization of the commodity version of the theorem is proved in section v the concept of a covariance is generalized university of michigan i have benefitted greatly from the comments of paul degrauwe wolfgang mayer michael mussa carl simon and robert stern as well as others who participated in seminars at the universities of michigan chicago and cincinnati and at the national bureau of economic research an anonymous referee also made valuable comments with additional goods and factor price equalization the theorem runs afoul of the indeterminacy of production and trade noted by paul samuelson 1953 and james melvin 1968 without factor price equalization trade impediments and intermediate production can cause reversals of the pattern of trade as shown in my 1979 article if additional factors and countries are also added it becomes difficult even to state the theorem let alone to prove it 2melvin stated such a theorem for the three good two factor case and jaroslav vanek 1968 proved it for the general case but only by assuming factor price equalization trent bertrand 1972 and jon harkness 1979 were able to drop the factor price equalization assumption but replaced it with restrictions on consumption of either goods or factors by country of origin it is unclear to me however that these restrictions can ever be met in a model that is otherwise plausible harkness 1978 has also used the factor content version of the theorems as the motivation for a regression equation relating commodity trade to factor intensities this bears some resemblance to my analysis below in section v see however james anderson 1981 and edward leamer and harry bowen 1981 who have criticized his result with a reply by harkness 1981 3for ease of exposition i do not allow here for transportation costs these were included in an earlier version of this paper following the technique in my 1980 article

trade patterns in developing countries 1964 82 this paper presents a regression analysis of import and export shares of gdp for 14 commodity and service categories in 55 developing countries over the period 1964 82 explanatory variables include gnp per capita population domestic capacity utilization the effective exchange rate and oecd real gnp for exports among other findings it is shown that countries trade patterns are not closely related to their growth performance and that developing countries on average run surpluses of exports over non capital goods imports on merchandise trade the current commodity surplus is required to offset imports of capital goods and a structural deficit on factor and non factor service trade

preferential trading agreements an investigation abstract a three country general equilibrium model of international trade in an arbitrary number of goods is constructed and the welfare effects of the formation of a preferential trading club e g customs union free trade area are analyzed

social status entry and predation the case of british shipping cartels 1879 1929 the authors incorporate social status and regional affiliation two variables of central sociological interest into an economic analysis of entry and predation they build on scott morton s 1997 examination of entry and predation in the merchant shipping industry and examine whether the social status of an entrant owner impacts on the predation behavior of the incumbent cartels they find that high social status entrants are significantly less likely 40 to be preyed upon than the low social status entrants they discuss several interpretations of this result subsequent analysis supports the hypothesis that cartel members use social status as an indicator of an entrant s propensity to be a cooperative cartel participant

agricultural exports and economic growth in less developed countries this article examines the contribution of agricultural exports to economic growth in less developed countries ldcs a sources of growth equation is developed from a dual economy model where agricultural and nonagricultural sectors are both divided into export and nonexport subsectors this is then estimated using panel data for 62 ldcs for 1974 1995 results provide evidence that there are significant structural differences in economic growth between low lower middle and upper income ldcs investment in the agricultural export subsector has a statistically identical impact on economic growth as investment in the nonagricultural export subsector the marginal productivities in nonexport subsectors are over 30 lower than those in respective export subsectors from a policy perspective the results suggest that export promotion policies should be balanced

export expansion and economic growth testing for cointegration and causality this paper develops a multivariate error correction model to test the causality between exports and growth in 15 asian countries 1967 91 the underlying series are tested as non stationary in levels but stationary in first differences the causal factors are cointegrated in five of these countries only causality test results indicate that export expansion causes growth in two third of these countries corrected for simultaneity between the causal factors a country with a large public sector higher level of economic development and which is less vulnerable to external economic shocks is more likely to reap the benefits of export promotion strategies the causal inferences are fairly stable over the sample period

oligopolistic equilibrium and financial constraints we provide a model of dynamic duopoly in which rms face nancial constraints and dissapear when they are unable to ful ll them we show that in some cases cournot outputs are no longer supported in equilibrium because if these outputs were set a rm may have incentives to ruin the other in these cases standard grim trigger strategies in which collusion is sustained by in nite reversion to cournot outputs cannot be used we show that there is a stationary markov equilibrium in mixed strategies where predation occurs with a positive probability we also obtain a modi ed folk theorem we show that any bankruptcy free outputs outputs in which no rm can drive another rm to bankruptcy without becoming bankrupt itself that attain individually rational pro ts re ecting bankruptcy consideration can be supported by a subgame perfect nash equilibrium when rms are su ciently long sighted

recent trends in trade among developing countries this paper presents the early results of empirical work on trade among developing countries the main conclusion is that non fuel trade among developing countries excluding capital surplus oil exporters remained a remarkably stable share of their total trade between 1963 and 1977 this constancy does however conceal two opposing trends the share of manufactures exported to developing countries has been falling sharply while that of non fuel primary commodities has been rising the latter largely because of the demands of the newly industrializing countries four particular points emerge from the evidence i there is no obvious sign of a bias against trade among developing countries except whatever effect their own commercial policies may have ii the more inward looking countries tend to send a higher proportion of their exports to other developing countries and regional integration strengthens this effect iii exports of manufactures to developing countries are much more capital intensive than those to industrialized countries and iv exports to developing country markets may not be the vital first stage for capital goods exports that is sometimes supposed

tests of the rational expectations hypothesis this paper reviews evidence on the structure of anticipation from a number of empirical studies jack muth s rational expectations hypothesis is compared with a variety of alternative models including ferber s law the implicit expectations model of edwin mills and muth s new errors in the variables model the cumulative evidence is of such strength as to compel the suspension of belief in the concept of rational expectations this implies that it is a mistake to proceed under the maintained hypothesis that expectations are rational instead it is necessary to test the sensitivity of empirical and theoretical results to alternative assumptions about the structure by which anticipations are generated copyright 1986 by american economic association

trade strategy in medium term adjustment abstract trade strategy is prominent in current discussions of stabilization and adjustment the orientation of trade strategy can be categorized according to revealed trade performance or characteristics of incentive structures or the nature of the main policy instruments the record of trade stratedy in developing countries has been richer and more complex than currently fashionable dichotomous categorizations in terms of inward or outward orientation suggest many trade strategy and policy issues remain unsettled these include the effects and optimal timing of import liberalization the appropriate instruments for export promotion trade policy concomitants of productivity change and interactions with microeconomic experience and policies among others more country specific and industry specific empirical research is necessary

predatory reputation in us airline markets abstract despite its long history in antitrust policy predation remains a poorly understood phenomenon the main difficulty is in empirically identifying predatory intent i propose a method for measuring the effect of reputation whose significance would enable us to infer predatory intents maximum likelihood estimation using simulated annealing algorithm is conducted with a sample of us airline markets the results provide some support for the presence of entrants learning and reputation effect as an application i discuss how the outcomes of my empirical model could help analyze such antitrust cases as the american airlines case