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6: Economies of Scale and International Trade

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    40893

    • Anonymous
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    One important motivation for international trade is the efficiency improvements that can arise because of the presence of economies of scale in production. Although economists wrote about these effects long ago, models of trade developed after the 1980s introduced economies of scale in creative new ways and became known as the “New Trade Theory.”

    In this chapter, the barest essentials of economies of scale models are developed to explain the rationale for trade with this production feature. The chapter also presents the monopolistic competition model of trade that incorporates an obvious feature of the real world—namely, the presence of heterogeneous goods.

    This page titled 6: Economies of Scale and International Trade is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Anonymous via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.