Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

1972

Economics

Columbia Law School

Articles 1 - 1 of 1

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Heckscher-Ohlin Theorem In The Multi-Commodity Case, Jagdish N. Bhagwati Jan 1972

The Heckscher-Ohlin Theorem In The Multi-Commodity Case, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

Ronald Jones, in his seminal paper (1957) on Heckscher-Ohlin theory, has argued that, for the case of two countries, two factors, and several commodities, the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem would remain valid in the following weak sense: "Ordering the commodities with respect to the capital-labor ratios employed in production is to rank them in order of comparative advantage. Demand conditions merely determine the dividing line between exports and imports; it is not possible to break the chain of comparative advantage by exporting, say, the third and fifth commodities and importing the fourth when they are ranked by factor intensity" (p. 85).

It …