International Factor Movements and National Advantage

Abstract

I am particularly touched by the invitation to give the V.K. Ramaswami Lecture this year. We were close personally and our friendship was enriched by a considerable body of joint theoretical work that was conceived and executed during his visits to Oxford and mine to Delhi over a period of many years. Ramaswami's distinction lay, not in creating dazzling but irrelevant logical constructs, but rather in the uncanny instinct with which he sensed an interesting analytical problem in issues of practical policy. Thus many of his most interesting trade-theoretic papers had a direct policy relevance, in the best tradition of economic science. And, despite the many claims on his time - it is remarkable that he was an overworked bureaucrat - he found the energy and the inclination to turn his analytical gifts on a wide range of problems. For example, he wrote two seminal papers on subjects that have been at the centre of active trade-theoretic research subsequently: the celebrated [1963] paper on distortions that stimulated and defined the framework of the recent, voluminous literature on the theory of policy intervention in an open economy; and his famous [1971] construction of an example designed to show the impossibility of devising an effective-rate-of-protection (ERP) index in the presence of generalized substitution, which was to generate sufficient controversy to provide the impetus for other theorists to analyse the ERP index in general-equilibrium models. He wrote much else. Indeed, the subject-matter of this Lecture was immediately evident to me when, in the course of recently formulating the analytical problems raised by the international movements of labour, I thought of a newpolicy-suggested problem only to have my memory jogged that Ramaswami probably had formulated the same problem many years ago. On consulting his posthumously collected Essays , I was delighted to find that my memory had served me right. Indeed, here was a beautiful little piece, of five terse and economical paragraphs

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