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General Equilibrium Theory And International Trade, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

This volume of Takashi Negishi's excellent essays in the theory of international trade underlines two major phenomena in this field: i) the displacement of the MarshalJian partialequilibriμm tools of analysis (now to be found only in the old-fashioned textbooks) by the general-equilibrium analysis of Mill, Marshan and Edgeworth which culminated in the major work of Meade and others; and ii) the emergence of a creative and ingenious school of Japanese international trade theorists in the last decade (of which Negishi is one of the more eminent members) which has virtually shifted the center of gravity in trade-theoretic research from England …

Domestic Distortions, Tariffs, And The Theory Of Optimum Subsidy: Some Further Results, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, V.K. Ramaswami, T.N. Srinivasan

Faculty Scholarship

Bhagwati and Ramaswami (1963) showed that if there is a distortion, the Paretian first-best policy is to intervene with a tax (subsidy) at the point at which the distortion occurs. Hence a domestic tax-cum-subsidy with respect to production would be first-best optimal when there was a domestic distortion (defined as the divergence between domestic prices and the marginal rate of transformation in domestic production) just as a tariff policy would be first-best optimal under monopoly power in trade (which involves a foreign distortion). An important corollary, for the case of a distortionary wage differential, is that while a tax-cum-subsidy policy …

Optimal Policies And Immiserizing Growth, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

In 1958, I analysed the paradoxical case of "immiserizing growth" [2] where a country, with monopoly power in trade, found that the growth-induced deterioration in its terms of trade implied a sufficiently large loss of welfare to outweigh the primary gain from growth. An obvious corollary of this proposition was that, if the country imposed an optimum tariff (either in both the pre-growth and the post-growth situations, or in the latter situation alone), this paradox would be eliminated.

James Melvin, in an interesting note [5], has now produced yet another analysis of immiserizing growth, where demand differences of the factor-intensity-reversals …