Industry location in the European Union is examined in order to explore the relevance of the "new" theories of trade and economic geography. The analysis is based on a set of highly disaggregated intra-industry trade indices for 19611990, complemented by sectoral employment statistics for EU countries and regions. It is found that, as predicted by the "new" theories, increasing-returns industri...

In the context of production scheduling, inserted idle time (IIT) occurs whenever a resource is deliberately kept idle in the face of waiting jobs. IIT schedules are particularly relevant in multimachine industrial situations where earliness costs and=or dynamically arriving jobs with due dates come into play. We provide a taxonomy of environments in which IIT scheduling is relevant, review the...

This paper formulates an empirical model to estimate the impact of endogenous new RTA membership on trade structure. The likelihood of new RTA membership is influenced by economic fundamentals such as country size, factor endowments and trade and investment costs. In a sample of country-pairs covering mainly the OECD economies we find a particularly strong effect of endogenous RTAs on intra-ind...

Firstly we shall introduce the development situation of China’s textile industry from international trade perspective, and then analyze the current international trade competition focusing on international trade barriers which consist of tariff and non-tariff barriers respectively. Finally we propose that increasing non-tariff barriers to China’s textile exportation are due to lower tariff, tra...

We developed a model to reconstruct the international trade network by considering both commodities and industry sectors in order to study the effects of reduced trade costs. First, we estimated trade costs to reproduce WIOD and NBERUN data. Using these costs, we estimated the trade costs of sector specific trade by types of commodities. We successfully reconstructed sector-specific trade for e...

In this paper, we merge the heterogenous firm model of Melitz (2003) with the Ricardian model of Dornbusch, Fisher and Samuelson (DFS 1977) to explain how the pattern of international specialization and trade is determined by the interaction of comparative advantage, economies of scale, country sizes and trade barriers. The model is able to capture the existence of inter-industry trade and intr...

In the last decade, Guilio Tononi has developed the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness. IIT postulates that consciousness is equal to integrated information (F). The goal of this paper is to show that IIT fails in its stated goal of quantifying consciousness. The paper will challenge the theoretical and empirical arguments in support of IIT. The main theoretical argument for t...

INTRODUCTION Following the landmark Leuven study in 2001, health care organizations implemented intensive insulin therapy (IIT) as the standard of care for critically ill patients. However, a recent meta-analysis showed no mortality benefit and an increased safety risk for patients treated with IIT. IIT affects labor and capital decisions related to nurses, physicians, pharmacists, managers, la...

Using a simple general equilibrium model with two countries and two sectors including one manufacturing sector producing (vertically) differentiated products, we first show that an international barrier to trade in the manufacturing sector creates inter-industry trade, whereas an international barrier to trade in the other sector generates intra-industry trade among vertically differentiated pr...