International Trade and Economic Development

Rajat Acharyya is Professor of Economics, and Dean, Faculty of Arts, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He has taught international economics at various institutes and universities in India and abroad for over two decades and has published extensively in the area. He received the EXIM Bank International Trade Research Award in 1997, the Global Development Network (Washington D.C.) Research Medal in 2003, and the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal Award in 2006. He has held visiting positions at Rochester University (USA), University of Kent at Canterbury (UK) and Utrecht School of Economics (The Netherlands). His research focuses on international trade, product quality and growth, regional trading blocs, and TRIPS and innovation in health care markets. Saibal Kar is Associate Professor of Economics at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). He is a Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) Bonn. He was a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2008-09) and is a guest lecturer at the Department of Economics, Calcutta University and Presidency University. Saibal has held visiting positions at Amsterdam School of Economics, Santa Fe Institute, HWWI Hamburg, UNU-WIDER, University of East Anglia, and Edith Cowan University. In recent years his research work in the areas of labour economics, international economics, and development economics, with emphasis on international labour migration. have been published in well known international journals. His book The Outsiders: Economic Reform and Informal Labour in a Developing Economy (with S. Marjit) was published by Oxford University Press in 2011.

The title of this new book by Acharyya and Kar says a lot by suggesting that the process of growth and development for most countries is closely linked to the extent of their involvement in international trade. The basic Ricardian concept of comparative advantage shows how all countries can in many ways make use of trade with other countries to support higher rates of growth and development. International trade allows a country to focus on producing not the entire range of commodities consumed, but instead to concentrate on producing the commodities in which it is relatively efficient in production, and all countries have such possibilities. The authors provide ample examples of how countries have raised living standards by taking such advantages provided by globalization. [continued below]

• Introduction ; 1. International Trade and Development Paradigms ; 2. Problems of Trade in Primary Commodities ; 3. Trade, Factors of Production and Growth ; 4. Foreign Direct Investment and Multinational Firms ; 5. International Labour Mobility and Welfare ; 6. Information, Labour Migration, and Occupation ; 7. Trade, Foreign Aid, and Welfare ; 8. Trade, Poverty, and Readjustments ; 9. Regional Trading Arrangements as Development Strategy ; 10. TRIPS, Product Standards and the Developing Economies ; 11. International Outsourcing, Off-shoring and Industrialization Strategies ; 12. Contagion of Crisis and Concluding Remarks