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Journal ArticleDOI

Intraindustry Specialization and the Gains from Trade

Paul Krugman
- 01 Oct 1981 - 
- Vol. 89, Iss: 5, pp 959-973
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TLDR
In this paper, the authors developed a simple model which illustrates that interindustry specialization and trade are also accompanied by intraindustry specialization, which reflects scale economies and consumers' taste for a diversity of products.
Abstract
Several recent empirical studies of trade suggest that interindustry specialization and trade, which reflect the conventional forces of comparative advantage, are also accompanied by intraindustry specialization, which reflects scale economies and consumers' taste for a diversity of products. This paper develops a simple model which illustrates this argument. Two main results are developed. First, the nature of trade depends on how similar countries are in their factor endowments. As countries become more similar, the trade between them will increasingly become intraindustry in character. Second, the effects of opening trade depend on its type. If intraindustry trade is sufficiently dominant, the advantages of extending the market will outweigh the distributional effects, and the owners of scarce as well as of abundant factors will be better off.

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Citations
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The Eclectic Paradigm of International Production: A Restatement and Some Possible Extensions

TL;DR: The authors reviewed some of the criticisms directed towards the eclectic paradigm of international production over the past decade, and restates its main tenets, concluding that it remains a robust general framework for explaining and analysing not only the economic rationale of economic production but many organisational and impact issues in relation to MNE activity as well.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Variety and Quality of a Nation's Exports

TL;DR: The authors found that the extensive margin accounts for around 60 percent of the greater exports of larger economies and that richer countries export higher quantities at modestly higher prices, while small economies export more in absolute terms than do small economies.
Journal ArticleDOI

International trade in the presence of product differentiation, economies of scale and monopolistic competition: A Chamberlin-Heckscher-Ohlin approach

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a generalization of the Heckscher-Ohlin theory by admitting the existence of sectors in which there is monopolistic competition and show that the intersectoral pattern of trade can be predicted from factor endowments but not from pre-trade commodity prices or factor rewards.
Journal ArticleDOI

Imperfect competition and international trade: Evidence from fourteen industrial countries

TL;DR: In this article, three hypotheses about the behavior of intraindustry trade in cross-country comparisons and time series data are discussed, and the authors conclude that changes over time in relative country size can explain the rising trade-income ratio.
Journal ArticleDOI

Science-based technologies: university–industry interactions in four fields

TL;DR: In this paper, a combination of a long-standing culture of co-operation and the economic success in the mechanical industry can be interpreted in terms of a specific path-dependant evolution of a stable sector of the national system of innovation, but with the tendency to lock-in effects.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Monopolistic competition and optimum product diversity

TL;DR: In this article, Pettengill tests whether there is an excessive number of firms in a monopolistically competitive equilibrium by a device of considerable expository merit, and redistributes the resources thus released equally over the remaining firms in the sector, to see if welfare can be improved.
Journal ArticleDOI

Increasing returns, monopolistic competition, and international trade

TL;DR: The authors developed a simple, general equilibrium model of non-comparative advantage trade and showed that trade and gains from trade will occur, even between countries with identical tastes, technology, and factor endowments.
Journal ArticleDOI

Internationally decreasing costs and world trade

TL;DR: In this article, a new analytical tool, the allocation curve, is developed for trade in intermediate goods, which is used to reformulate the existing theory of international trade and increasing returns by arguing that such returns depend upon the size of the world market rather than national output.