TY  - JOUR
AU  - Costinot,Arnaud
TI  - An Elementary Theory of Comparative Advantage
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14645
PY  - 2009
Y2  - January 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14645
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14645.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Arnaud Costinot
Department of Economics
MIT, E52-243B
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge MA 02142-1347
Tel: 617/324-1712
Fax: 617/253-1330
E-Mail: costinot@mit.edu
AB  - Comparative advantage, whether driven by technology or factor endowment, is at the core of neoclassical trade theory. Using tools from the mathematics of complementarity, this paper offers a simple, yet unifying perspective on the fundamental forces that shape comparative advantage. The main results characterize sufficient conditions on factor productivity and factor supply to predict patterns of international specialization in a multi-factor generalization of the Ricardian model to which we refer as an "elementary neoclassical economy." These conditions, which hold for an arbitrarily large number of countries, goods, and factors, generalize and extend many results from the previous trade literature. They also offer new insights about the joint effects of technology and factor endowments on international specialization.
ER  -