An Introduction to International Economics
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The Best Books of Check out the top books of the year on our page Best Books of Looking for beautiful books? Visit our Beautiful Books page and find lovely books for kids, photography lovers and more. Table of contents 1. Comparative Advantage 31 3. The Standard Trade Model 55 4. Economic Integration 8. Growth and Development with International Trade 9.
Balance of Payments The International Monetary System: Past, Present, and Future show more. He has given more than lectures around the world, was awarded the Achievement Award by the City of University of New York in , and was nominated for the National Medal of Science awarded by the President of the United States. Book ratings by Goodreads. Markets in financial assets tend to be more volatile than markets in goods and services because decisions are more often revised and more rapidly put into effect. There is the share presumption that a transaction that is freely undertaken will benefit both parties, but there is a much greater danger that it will be harmful to others.
For example, mismanagement of mortgage lending in the United States led in to banking failures and credit shortages in other developed countries, and sudden reversals of international flows of capital have often led to damaging financial crises in developing countries.
And, because of the incidence of rapid change, the methodology of comparative statics has fewer applications than in the theory of international trade, and empirical analysis is more widely employed. Also, the consensus among economists concerning its principal issues is narrower and more open to controversy than is the consensus about international trade.
A major change in the organisation of international finance occurred in the latter years of the twentieth century, and economists are still debating its implications. But in the United States government announced that it was suspending the convertibility of the dollar, and there followed a progressive transition to the current regime of floating exchange rates in which most governments no longer attempt to control their exchange rates or to impose controls upon access to foreign currencies or upon access to international financial markets.
The behaviour of the international financial system was transformed. Exchange rates became very volatile and there was an extended series of damaging financial crises. One study estimated that by the end of the twentieth century there had been banking crises in 93 countries, [38] another that there had been 26 banking crises, 86 currency crises and 27 mixed banking and currency crises, [39] many times more than in the previous post-war years.
The outcome was not what had been expected.
In making an influential case for flexible exchange rates in the s, Milton Friedman had claimed that if there were any resulting instability, it would mainly be the consequence of macroeconomic instability, [40] but an empirical analysis in found no apparent connection. Neoclassical theory had led them to expect capital to flow from the capital-rich developed economies to the capital-poor developing countries - because the returns to capital there would be higher.
Flows of financial capital would tend to increase the level of investment in the developing countries by reducing their costs of capital, and the direct investment of physical capital would tend to promote specialisation and the transfer of skills and technology.
However, theoretical considerations alone cannot determine the balance between those benefits and the costs of volatility, and the question has had to be tackled by empirical analysis. A International Monetary Fund working paper offers a summary of the empirical evidence. They suggest that net benefits can be achieved by countries that are able to meet threshold conditions of financial competence but that for others, the benefits are likely to be delayed, and vulnerability to interruptions of capital flows is likely to be increased.
Although the majority of developed countries now have "floating" exchange rates , some of them — together with many developing countries — maintain exchange rates that are nominally "fixed", usually with the US dollar or the euro. Some governments have abandoned their national currencies in favour of the common currency of a currency area such as the " eurozone " and some, such as Denmark, have retained their national currencies but have pegged them at a fixed rate to an adjacent common currency.
An Introduction to International Economics: New Perspectives on the World Economy | About
On an international scale, the economic policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund IMF have had a major influence, especially upon the developing countries. The IMF was set up in to encourage international cooperation on monetary matters, to stabilise exchange rates and create an international payments system. Its principal activity is the payment of loans to help member countries to overcome balance of payments problems , mainly by restoring their depleted currency reserves.
Their loans are, however, conditional upon the introduction of economic measures by recipient governments that are considered by the Fund's economists to provide conditions favourable to recovery. Their recommended economic policies are broadly those that have been adopted in the United States and the other major developed countries known as the " Washington Consensus " and have often included the removal of all restrictions upon incoming investment. The Fund has been severely criticised by Joseph Stiglitz and others for what they consider to be the inappropriate enforcement of those policies and for failing to warn recipient countries of the dangers that can arise from the volatility of capital movements.
From the time of the Great Depression onwards, regulators and their economic advisors have been aware that economic and financial crises can spread rapidly from country to country, and that financial crises can have serious economic consequences. For many decades, that awareness led governments to impose strict controls over the activities and conduct of banks and other credit agencies, but in the s many governments pursued a policy of deregulation in the belief that the resulting efficiency gains would outweigh any systemic risk s.
The extensive financial innovations that followed are described in the article on financial economics. One of their effects has been greatly to increase the international inter-connectedness of the financial markets and to create an international financial system with the characteristics known in control theory as "complex-interactive". The stability of such a system is difficult to analyse because there are many possible failure sequences. The internationally systemic crises that followed included the equity crash of October , [43] the Japanese asset price collapse of the s [44] the Asian financial crisis of [45] the Russian government default of [46] which brought down the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund and the sub-prime mortgages crisis.
Measures designed to reduce the vulnerability of the international financial system have been put forward by several international institutions. The Bank for International Settlements made two successive recommendations Basel I and Basel II [48] concerning the regulation of banks, and a coordinating group of regulating authorities, and the Financial Stability Forum , that was set up in to identify and address the weaknesses in the system, has put forward some proposals in an interim report. Elementary considerations lead to a presumption that international migration results in a net gain in economic welfare.
Wage differences between developed and developing countries have been found to be mainly due to productivity differences [18] which may be assumed to arise mostly from differences in the availability of physical, social and human capital. And economic theory indicates that the move of a skilled worker from a place where the returns to skill are relatively low to a place where they are relatively high should produce a net gain but that it would tend to depress the wages of skilled workers in the recipient country. There have been many econometric studies intended to quantify those gains.
From the standpoint of a developing country, the emigration of skilled workers represents a loss of human capital known as brain drain , leaving the remaining workforce without the benefit of their support. That effect upon the welfare of the parent country is to some extent offset by the remittances that are sent home by the emigrants, and by the enhanced technical know-how with which some of them return. One study introduces a further offsetting factor to suggest that the opportunity to migrate fosters enrolment in education thus promoting a "brain gain" that can counteract the lost human capital associated with emigration.
Whereas some studies suggest that parent countries can benefit from the emigration of skilled workers, [54] generally it is emigration of unskilled and semi-skilled workers that is of economic benefit to countries of origin, by reducing pressure for employment creation. The crucial issues, as recently acknowledged by the OECD, is the matter of return and reinvestment in their countries of origin by the migrants themselves: Unlike movement of capital and goods, since government policies have tried to restrict migration flows, often without any economic rationale.
Such restrictions have had diversionary effects, channeling the great majority of migration flows into illegal migration and "false" asylum-seeking. Since such migrants work for lower wages and often zero social insurance costs, the gain from labour migration flows is actually higher than the minimal gains calculated for legal flows; accompanying side-effects are significant, however, and include political damage to the idea of immigration, lower unskilled wages for the host population, and increased policing costs alongside lower tax receipts.
The term globalization has acquired a variety of meanings, but in economic terms it refers to the move that is taking place in the direction of complete mobility of capital and labour and their products, so that the world's economies are on the way to becoming totally integrated. The driving forces of the process are reductions in politically imposed barriers and in the costs of transport and communication although, even if those barriers and costs were eliminated, the process would be limited by inter-country differences in social capital.
It is a process which has ancient origins [ citation needed ] , which has gathered pace in the last fifty years, but which is very far from complete. In its concluding stages, interest rates, wage rates and corporate and income tax rates would become the same everywhere, driven to equality by competition, as investors, wage earners and corporate and personal taxpayers threatened to migrate in search of better terms.
In fact, there are few signs of international convergence of interest rates, wage rates or tax rates. Although the world is more integrated in some respects, it is possible to argue that on the whole it is now less integrated than it was before the first world war, [55] and that many middle-east countries are less globalised than they were 25 years ago. Of the moves toward integration that have occurred, the strongest has been in financial markets, in which globalisation is estimated to have tripled since the mids.
It is estimated to have resulted in net welfare gains worldwide, but with losers as well as gainers. Increased globalisation has also made it easier for recessions to spread from country to country. A reduction in economic activity in one country can lead to a reduction in activity in its trading partners as a result of its consequent reduction in demand for their exports, which is one of the mechanisms by which the business cycle is transmitted from country to country.
Introduction to International Economics
Empirical research confirms that the greater the trade linkage between countries the more coordinated are their business cycles. Globalisation can also have a significant influence upon the conduct of macroeconomic policy. The Mundell—Fleming model and its extensions [60] are often used to analyse the role of capital mobility and it was also used by Paul Krugman to give a simple account of the Asian financial crisis [61]. Part of the increase in income inequality that has taken place within countries is attributable - in some cases - to globalisation.
A recent IMF report demonstrates that the increase in inequality in the developing countries in the period to was due entirely to technological change, with globalisation making a partially offsetting negative contribution, and that in the developed countries globalisation and technological change were equally responsible. Globalisation is seen as contributing to economic welfare by most economists — but not all.
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Professor Joseph Stiglitz [63] of the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University has advanced the infant industry case for protection in developing countries and criticised the conditions imposed for help by the International Monetary Fund. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Part of a series on Economics Index Outline Category. History of economics Schools of economics Mainstream economics Heterodox economics Economic methodology Economic theory Political economy Microeconomics Macroeconomics International economics Applied economics Mathematical economics Econometrics.
Economic systems Economic growth Market National accounting Experimental economics Computational economics Game theory Operations research. Venables , "International Trade: Blejer and Jacob A. Foundations of International Macroeconomics. Archived at the Wayback Machine. Review of Economic Studies. Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science. Essays in International Trade Theory: