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Introduction

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Product Characteristics in International Economics

Part of the book series: Contributions to Economics ((CE))

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Abstract

National economies are linked through flows of capital and goods. This book deals with these linkages, analyzes their benefits for economic development, and evaluates a country’s possibilities to reap the best possible rewards from influencing these linkages. This chapter introduces the general topic of the book, summarizes the contributions of each individual chapter, and puts the chapters in relation to one another.

“Exporting potato chips or microchips is vastly different, so the capacity of exports to generate and sustain GDP growth is related not only to the volume but also to the structure of exports.” (Thaiprasert 2011, p. 1)

“[…] it matters whether a nation specializes in potato chips or microchips […], because the latter offers spin-off effects in technology and human capital development that encourage growth in other industries, thereby strengthening everything from the nation’s education to its national security” (Moon 1999 , p. 42)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For example, Brander (1995) and Kerr and Gaisford (2010) offer reviews of theoretical papers on market imperfections causing externalities that show that protectionism can also “be part of an optimal policy” (Spector 2001, p. 444). Similarly, the impact of FDI on economic development is theoretically unclear, because there are several channels that may facilitate positive and negative growth in a hosting country (see Forte and Moura 2013).

  2. 2.

    For empirical papers about the impact of FDI on economic development, the literature reviews of Ozturk (2007) and Almfraji and Almsafir (2014) conclude that the results are mixed. For empirical papers about the impact of trade on economic development, the results mostly find a positive relationship (see Giles and Williams 2000), but a large proportion of empirical studies can be considered as either only weakly reliable or ambiguous in their results, as Rodrik (2005, p. 971) points out, for example. Especially, cross-section evidence has often been criticized, because its results “arise either from obvious misspecification or from the use of measures of openness that are proxies for other policy or institutional variables that have an independent detrimental effect on growth” (Rodríguez and Rodrik 2000, p. 315).

  3. 3.

    It is worth to note that Smith (1776, Book II, Chapter III) already had this logic in mind when he wrote about ‘productive’ labor (manufacturing), and ‘unproductive’ labor (military work, services, and art). The inherent logic of productive vs. unproductive labor is also used by Kaldor (1966) and, more recent, by Rodrik (2016) when they argue that the increasing de-industrialization can harm economic growth because the service sector is less technologically progressive than the manufacturing sector. However, in both lines of argumentation the linkages to other industries are not at the heart of their logical reasoning.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaft, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

    Stephan Huber

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Huber, S. (2018). Introduction. In: Product Characteristics in International Economics. Contributions to Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76093-3_1

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