工商导论复习.docVIP

1. In his 1776 landmark book The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that countries differ in their ability to produce goods efficiently. a country has an absolute advantage in the production of a product when it is more efficient than any other country in producing it. 绝对优势 2. David Ricardo took Adam Smith’s theory one step further by exploring what might happen when one country has an absolute advantage in the production of all goods. Comparative advantage--------It makes sense for a country to specialize in the production of those goods that it produces most efficiently and to buy the goods that it produces less efficiently from other countries, even if this means buying goods from other countries that it could produce more efficiently itself. 相对优势 3. Heckscher-Ohlin Theory Swedish economists Eli Heckscher (in 1919) and Bertil Ohlin (in 1933) put forward a different explanation of comparative advantage. They argued that comparative advantage arises from differences in national factor endowments. 要素禀赋 By factor endowments they meant the extent to which a country is endowed with such resources as land, labor, and capital. Nations have varying factor endowments, and different factor endowments explain differences in factor costs. 4. New Trade Theory Economies of scale are unit cost reductions associated with a large scale of output.经济规模 If international trade results in a country specializing in the production of a certain good, and if there are economies of scale in producing that good, then as output of that good expands, unit costs will fall. In such a case, there will be increasing returns to specialization. New trade theory also argues that if the output required to realize significant scale economies represents a substantial proportion of total world demand for that product, the world market may be able to support only a limited number of firms based in a limited number of countries producing that product. Those firms that enter the world market first may g