Текст 10 Comparative Advantage
We start by showing the benefits of trade when there are international differences in the opportunity cost of goods. The opportunity cost of a good is the quantity of other good is that must be sacrificed to make one more unit of that good.
Suppose a closed economy with given resources can make video recorders or shirts. The more resources are used to make videos, the less resources can be used to make shirts. The opportunity cost of videos is the quantity of shirt output sacrificed by using resources to make videos instead of shirts.
Opportunity costs tell us about the relative costs of producing different goods. We now develop a model in which international differences in relative production costs determine the pattern of international trade. The mode! demonstrates the law of comparative advantage.
The law of comparative advantage states that countries specialize in producing and exporting the goods that they produce at a lower relative cost than other countries.
There are many reasons why opportunity costs or relative costs may differ in different countries, We begin with a very simple model in which technology or productivity is the source of the difference. Suppose there are two countries, the United States and the UK, producing two goods, video recorders and shirts. We pretend that labor is the only factor of production and there are constant returns to scale. Table 32-6 shows the assumptions about production costs. It takes 30 hours of American labor to produce one video and 5 hours to produce one shirt, UK labor is less productive. It takes 60 hours of British labor to produce one video and 6 hours to produce one shirt.
Текст 11 gatt
After the war there was a collective determination to see world trade restored. Bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were set up and a large number of countries signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a commitment to reduce tariffs successively and dismantle trade restrictions.
Under successive rounds of GATT, tariffs fell steadily. By 1960 US tariffs were only about one-fifth their level at the outbreak of the Second World War, In the UK the system of wartime quotas on imports had been dismantled by the mid-1950s, after which tariffs were reduced by nearly half in the ensuing 25 years. Europe as a whole has moved towards an enlarged European Community in which tariffs between member countries have been abolished.
Thus, at the start of the 1980s tariff levels throughout the world economy were probably as low as they had ever been. And world trade had seen three decades of rapid growth, arising at least in part from the success of GATT in removing trade restrictions. But the threat of protection had not been abolished forever. With increasing unemployment in the industrial economies in the early 1980s there has been renewed pressure for tariffs, partly for the reasons we set out in the previous section. The United States imposed a quota on steel imports from Japan and Europe, and the Japanese have agreed to restrict their exports I of cars to Europe and the United States.