A Direct Test of the Theory of Comparative Advantage: The Case of Japan

Daniel M. Bernhofen · John C. Brown

130 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Political Economy

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Global trade and economics Historical Economic and Social Studies Global Trade and Competitiveness

Abstract

We exploit Japan’s sudden and complete opening up to international trade in the 1860s to test the empirical validity of one of the oldest and most fundamental propositions in economics: the theory of comparative advantage. Historical evidence supports the assertion that the characteristics of the Japanese economy at the time were compatible with the key assumptions of the neoclassical trade model. Using detailed product‐specific data on autarky prices and trade flows, we find that the autarky price value of Japan’s trade is negative for each year of the period 1868–75. This confirms the prediction of the theory.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 130 citations exist upstream.

References

1996The Use of Knowledge in Society 1985Market Structure and Foreign Trade: Increasing Returns, Imperfect Competition and the International Economy 1985Market structure and foreign trade 1980Theory of International Trade 1984The theory of international trade 2014Handbook of International Economics 1994International Trade Theory: The Evidence 1984Testing trade theories and predicting trade flows

Cited by

2010The competitive advantage of nations: is Porter’s Diamond Framework a new theory that explains the international competitiveness of countries?2015Acquisitions, Productivity, and Profitability: Evidence from the Japanese Cotton Spinning Industry 2005An Empirical Assessment of the Comparative Advantage Gains from Trade: Evidence from Japan 2008Specialization and the Volume of Trade: Do the Data Obey the Laws?2019Centers of gravity: The effect of stable shared leadership in top management teams on firm growth and industry evolution

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.