Suchergebnisse

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of international movements of labour and capital upon the commodity terms of trade. The development of the modern theory of international trade, initiated by E. Heckscher and B. Ohlin has enabled us to relax the classical assumption of complete immobility of factors among different countries, and to analyse the international movements of goods and factors within the same theoretical framework. Thus, both Heckscher and Ohlin emphasized the substitutive relationship between international trade and factor movements. But the effects of international factor movements upon the international terms of trade seem to have attracted comparatively less attention. Although the question known as the "transfer problem" was subject to detailed investigation, it is not concerned with the movement of factors of production per se.Professors J. E. Meade and H. G. Johnson independently considered international factor movements from the long-run point of view, and presented rigorous analyses of their effects upon the commodity terms of trade. Meade dealt with the international migration of labour in order to give a theoretical basis to the regulation of migration, whereas Johnson made an ingenious use of Rybczynski's theorem to analyse the effects of international transmissions of productive power upon the terms of trade. The present paper attempts to push their analyses a little further by developing a general formulation of the problem within a neo-Heckscher-Ohlin trade model.