Reto Foellmi - Böcker

In Understanding International Trade, Reto Foellmi and Stefan Legge provide a clear, structured, and profound introduction to the theory of international trade. Designed for students and practitioners with an interest in global economics, the book explains why nations trade, how trade affects welfare and income distribution, and what determines the patterns and volume of global trade flows.Starting with the earliest trade models, such as Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage, the book walks through a range of foundational and advanced models, seeking a deep understanding while avoiding technical overload. It includes the Heckscher-Ohlin framework, specific-factors models, the Dornbusch-Fischer-Samuelson and the Eaton-Kortum model. It then transitions to modern trade theory, covering increasing returns to scale, monopolistic competition, and firm-level heterogeneity as in the Krugman and Melitz models. Each model is presented with a clear setup, graphical illustrations, and economic intuition, allowing readers to understand the underlying mechanisms as well as policy implications. The book emphasizes both the theoretical and empirical relevance of trade models. It explains how trade costs, productivity differences, and endowment structures influence trade flows, and introduces tools like the gravity equation for analyzing real-world data. While it focuses on real trade in goods, it also touches on factor mobility and the role of institutions in shaping trade outcomes.A comprehensive yet approachable guide with exercises at the end of each chapter, this book offers a better understanding of the logic, structure, and real-world relevance of international trade theory.

This book looks at the distribution of income and wealth and the effects that this has on the macroeconomy, and vice versa. Is a more equal distribution of income beneficial or harmful for macroeconomic growth, and how does the distribution of wealth evolve in a market economy? Taking stock of results and methods developed in the context of the 1990s revival of growth theory, the authors focus on capital accumulation and long-run growth. They show how rigorous, optimization-based technical tools can be applied, beyond the representative-agent framework of analysis, to account for realistic market imperfections and for political-economic interactions. The treatment is thorough, yet accessible to students and nonspecialist economists, and it offers specialist readers a wide-ranging and innovative treatment of an increasingly important research field. The book follows a single analytical thread through a series of different growth models, allowing readers to appreciate their structure and crucial assumptions.This is particularly useful at a time when the literature on income distribution and growth has developed quickly and in several different directions, becoming difficult to overview.

This book looks at the distribution of income and wealth and the effects that this has on the macroeconomy, and vice versa. Is a more equal distribution of income beneficial or harmful for macroeconomic growth, and how does the distribution of wealth evolve in a market economy? Taking stock of results and methods developed in the context of the 1990s revival of growth theory, the authors focus on capital accumulation and long-run growth. They show how rigorous, optimization-based technical tools can be applied, beyond the representative-agent framework of analysis, to account for realistic market imperfections and for political-economic interactions. The treatment is thorough, yet accessible to students and nonspecialist economists, and it offers specialist readers a wide-ranging and innovative treatment of an increasingly important research field. The book follows a single analytical thread through a series of different growth models, allowing readers to appreciate their structure and crucial assumptions.This is particularly useful at a time when the literature on income distribution and growth has developed quickly and in several different directions, becoming difficult to overview.