Economic Integration and Welfare: Manufacturing vs. Agricultural Markets

In the literature of new trade theory, most studies have dealt with industrial location by imposing an assumption of free transportation in the agricultural sector. We explicitly incorporate arbitrary transport costs in both the manufacturing and agricultural sectors into the Helpman-Krugman-Davis model of two countries and one production factor. The following results are obtained. First, we find a necessary and sufficient condition for the home market effect (HME) to be observed. Secondly, we find that integrating manufacturing markets has contrastive impacts on two countries to integrating the agricultural markets. Our results are suggestive for the understanding of various international trade agreements.