New Trade Theory - History of The Theory's Development

History of The Theory's Development

The theory was initially associated with Paul Krugman in the late 1970s; Krugman claims that he heard about monopolistic competition from Robert Solow. Looking back in 1996 Krugman wrote that International economics a generation earlier had completely ignored returns to scale. "The idea that trade might reflect an overlay of increasing-returns specialization on comparative advantage was not there at all: instead, the ruling idea was that increasing returns would simply alter the pattern of comparative advantage." In 1976, however, MIT-trained economist Victor Norman had worked out the central elements of what came to be known as the Helpman-Krugman theory. He wrote it up and showed it to Avinash Dixit. However, they both agreed the results were not very significant. Indeed Norman never had the paper typed up, much less published. Norman's formal stake in the race comes from the final chapters of the famous Dixit-Norman book.

James Brander, a PhD student at Stanford at the time, was undertaking similarly innovative work using models from industrial organisation theory—cross-hauling—to explain two-way trade in similar products.

Read more about this topic:  New Trade Theory

Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history of, history, theory and/or development:

    The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.
    Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)

    The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.
    Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)

    The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.
    Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)

    [Anarchism] is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony. It is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the Dawn.
    Emma Goldman (1869–1940)

    Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace.
    Benito Mussolini (1883–1945)