The Structure of Foreign Trade：（对外贸易的结构）.pdfVIP

Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 13, Number 2—Spring 1999—Pages 121–144 The Structure of Foreign Trade Elhanan Helpman orld merchandise exports amounted to $5.3 trillion in 1997 and exports of commercial services amounted to $1.3 trillion. These are unprece- W dented volumes that have expanded much faster than income in the postwar period. Figure 1 presents long-term trends in the real volumes of merchan- dise trade and output. While trade grew at an annual rate of 2.6 percent during this period, output grew at only 1.5 percent. More than half of the volume of merchan- dise trade flows amongst developed countries and less than 15 percent flows amongst developing countries. The rest, about one third, represents North-South trade between developed and developing countries. What explains these large volumes of trade? Why do some countries export computers while others export footwear? Can exports of airplanes be explained in the same way as exports of paper products? Questions of this type have been examined for many years. In attempting to answer them, economists have devel- oped an elaborate analytical apparatus that has been greatly enriched in the last two decades. They have used the insights from trade theory to examine ever richer data sets in order to discover systematic patterns of trade flows and to evaluate how well available theories match these data. Nevertheless, although we do have today better answers to some of these questions than our predecessors had 40 years ago, the evolving structure of world trade defies simple explanations. I describe in this paper what we know about foreign trade and in what ways our understanding has improved as a result of the last 20 years of research. The paper is in five parts. In the next section I briefly review early insights: David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage and a simplified version of the El