The Region and Trade

New Analytical Directions

Although international trade has been much studied by both economists and regional scientists, the nature, causes, and the consequences of interregional trade, i.e., trade between regions within countries has received far less attention. In addition, given recent advances in new economic geography on the theoretical front and in the development of both input-output and computable general equilibrium models on the empirical front, the important subject of interregional trade is now open to study using these theoretical and empirical methodologies. Given this state of affairs, this book aims to present chapters written by a carefully selected group of experts in the field and thereby shed valuable light on key outstanding questions concerning the region and trade. These questions include, but are not limited to, the role of external economies in shaping the pattern of interregional trade, the role of natural resources versus traditional factors of production such as labor and capital in driving interregional trade, the relationship between transport and interregional trade, “high value” interregional trade in services, and the role of interregional trade estimation in the construction of a multi-regional, input-output system.

Contents:

• Introduction:

  • Introduction to "The Region and Trade: New Analytical Directions" (Amitrajeet A Batabyal and Peter Nijkamp)

• Theory:

  • Statistical Discrimination, Endogenous Quality, and North–South Trade (Arnab K Basu)
  • Regional Trade in a Three Country Model (Henry Thompson)
  • Voluntary Formation of Free Trade Area in a Third Country Market Model (Ryoichi Nomura, Takao Ohkawa, Makoto Okamura and Makoto Tawada)

• Empirics:

  • Exploring the Spatial Connectivity of US States, 1993–2007 (Jee-Sun Lee and Geoffrey J D Hewings)
  • Manufacturing Fetishism: The Neo-Mercantilist Preoccupation with Protecting Manufacturing (Alecia Waite Cassidy, Edward Tower and Xiaolu Wang)
  • The Evolution of Freight Movement and Associated Non-Point-Source Emissions in the Midwest–Northeast Transportation Corridor of the United States, 1977–2007 (Benjamin Brown-Steiner, Jialie Chen and Kieran Donaghy)
  • Multipliers in an Island Economy: The Case of the Azores Eduardo Haddad, Vasco Silva, Alexandre Porsse and Tomaz Dentinho)
  • Inter-Regional Trade in Research-Based Knowledge: The Case of the EISCAT Radar System (Folke Snickars and Simon Falck)

• Theory and Empirics:

  • Trade Openness and City Interaction (Mauricio Ramírez Grajeda and Ian M Sheldon)
  • Infrastructure and the International Export Performance of Turkish Regions (Mehmet Guney Celbis, Peter Nijkamp and Jacques Poot)
  • Trade in Services and Regional Specialization: Evidence and Theory (Hamid Beladi and Saibal Kar)

Readership: Graduate and research level individuals interested in regional economics and interregional trade issues.
Key Features:

• Sheds new light on important and hitherto unstudied questions concerning interregional trade
• Collects the results of frontier level research regarding many different questions in interregional trade
• Shows how recent advances in theoretical and empirical modeling can be gainfully utilized to shed new light on research questions in interregional trade