Lectures on International Trade

This textbook by two eminent theorists of international trade presents the most integrated and ambitious treatment of the subject available to date. It has evolved over several years of lectures to graduate students at major campuses such as MIT, Yale, and Columbia. While it is primarily addressed to graduate-level courses, it can also be easily adapted to upper-level undergraduate use, since the exposition starts from basic principles. Intuitive, geometric, and mathematical arguments are judiciously combined in a masterly treatment that makes this a unique and authoritative text in the field.

The book concerns pure rather than monetary theory, and its thirty-four chapters are organized into four parts. The first develops alternative models and theories explaining the trade pattern. The second is addressed to tariffs, quotas, and transfers. The third develops the theory of trade and welfare. The topics include gain from trade, theory of distortions and policy intervention, immiserizing growth, customs unions, DUP activities, international capital flows and migration. The final part treats other threshold topics such as trade and growth, two-ness and duality, cost-benefit analysis and uncertainty.

Jagdish N. Bhagwati is Arthur Lehman Professor of Economics and Director, International Economics Research Center, at Columbia University. Among his books are International Trade: Selected Readings (MIT Press, 1981) which complements and can be effectively used with this new text. T.N. Srinivasan is Samuel C. Park Jr. Professor of Economics at Yale University.