Regional Competition for Mobile Oligopolistic Firms: Does Public Provision of Local Inputs Lead to Agglomeration?

We develop a model in which two regional governments compete for two mobile oligopolistic firms. Regional governments provide local infrastructure to attract mobile firms in order to increase regional employment and income. Firms face the trade-off between better regional infrastructure and fiercer competition for local workers. Strategic interaction prevails at the regional level as well as at the firm level. We show that an equilibrium with spatial concentration of firms as well as an equilibrium with spatial diversification of firms exists. In almost all cases regional competition leads to a suboptimal provision of local infrastructure.     

A Geographical Product Differentiation Model of Trade Competition in Third Markets

Product differentiation trade models have been developed in order to account for some contemporary patterns of international trade that are inexplicable under the theory of comparative advantage. This paper presents the case for the geographical differentiation of products. A generalized geographical product differentiation model of trade competition in industrial third markets is outlined within a discrete choice framework. The model treats product price and quality, as determined by country of origin, as distinct variables in export competition. An indirect empirical test of the model's validity, using the cases of export competition between the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States and Japan, indicates that the generalized model is worthwhile in its ability to account for successful trade competition.     

A spatial duopoly: competition in the western Canadian fur trade, 1770–1835

The period 1770–1835 witnessed the growth and climax of intense fur trade rivalry in western Canada between the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company together with independent “peddlers”. This competition had significant spatial consequences, most notably the proliferation of posts on interior waterways, leap-frogging of competitors to more advantageous locations, leading to close clustering of rival posts. This clustering occurred in spite of a bitter and sometimes violent tug-of-war over Indian fur supplies. This locational pattern is examined in the light of Harold Hotelling's concept of duopolistic competition. A spatial duopoly model is described and applied to the fur trade and indicates that the clustering of rival posts was a predictable outgrowth of duopolistic economic forces, rather than an anomalous result of perverse non-economic behaviour. These conclusions are affirmed by observers of the trade at the time of competition and by evidence of spatial change in the locational pattern following the merger of the two rivals in 1821.     

中国与环南海国家(地区)贸易竞争性和互补性格局

环南海因其重要的地缘战略意义,对中国国家安全和对外合作发展具有重要意义.本文在产品层次,揭示了中国与环南海国家(地区)的贸易竞争性和互补性格局,有助于加深理解中国与该区域的地缘经济竞合关系.结果表明:①中国大陆与环南海国家(地区)的贸易规模不断增大.中国大陆与香港、台湾、越南、菲律宾、新加坡、泰国的出口相似度较高,在世...     

STACKELBERG GAMES ON A NETWORK WITH COURNOT-NASH OLIGOPOLISTIC COMPETITORS

ABSTRACT. We formulate the spatial Stackelberg-Nash-Cournot competitive network equilibrium problem as a variational inequality constrained mathematical program. Our model differs from previous models of Stackelberg oligopolistic competition in that it employs explicit shipping decision variables and a general network topology. That is, the production and distribution decisions of the Stackelberg firm are determined simultaneously over a discrete network. We explore the existence of solutions to the proposed model, and we also numerically test a sensitivity analysis based algorithm. In particular, we illustrate how sensitivity analysis results can be used to generate the Cournot reaction necessary to solve the Stackelberg problem.     

Pour une sociologie de la société transnationale

Proposing a general framework for the study of the emerging transnational society, the article critically surveys predominant disciplinary perspectives in this field, and outlines an approach based on a core/periphery model with oligopolistic competition. Within this general framework, sociology finds its specific subject in the ties that connect human beings across national borders, directly or mediated by transnational institutions. An elaborated and amended version of this approach is illustrated, among others, by the dynamics of cultural globalization and the «world language system».     

Haggling Highlanders: Marketplaces,Middlemen and Moral Economy in the Papua New Guinean Betel Nut Trade

The rise of competitive trade practices represents a significant development in Papua New Guinea's marketplaces. Overt competition and haggling, once conspicuous by their near absence, are now commonplace in the country's betel nut marketplaces, and increasingly visible in many of the large urban fresh food marketplaces. This has emerged with the rise of long‐distance and intermediary trading, and with increasing numbers of people dependent on trade for their livelihood. This paper explores moral economy, and the interactions and negotiations around price between lowland betel nut producers and highland wholesale traders as they occur in marketplaces and in rural production areas. It documents how the moral obligations that arise from trade itself, and entangled with self‐interest, tempers competition and fosters solidarity amongst traders, redirects competition onto their interactions with producers, and in doing so reinforces existing power asymmetries.     

HOTELLING'S “MAIN STREET” WITH MORE THAN TWO COMPETITORS*

ABSTRACT. I analyze oligopolistic competition among three or more firms located on Hotelling's (1929) Main Street and show that in contrast with Hotelling's duopoly, the symmetric locational structure supports a noncooperative equilibrium in prices. However, in a two-stage game of location choice in the first stage, and price choice in the second stage, there exists no subgame-perfect equilibrium where the whole market is served. This is because, starting from any locational pattern, firms have incentives to move toward the central firm. This strong version of the Principle of Minimum Differentiation destroys the possibility of a locational equilibrium. The results are a direct consequence of the existence of boundaries in the space of location. The sharp difference between these results and those of the standard circular model (whose product space lacks boundaries) shows that the general use of the circular model as an approximation to the line interval model may be unwarranted.     

SPATIAL COMPETITION À LA COURNOT: PRICE DISCRIMINATION BY QUANTITY-SETTING OLIGOPOLISTS*

In this paper, we consider oligopolistic competition in a spatial model when firms take care of goods' delivery and discriminate among consumers. Firms compete by setting quantity schedules independently over space. We show that under general conditions a Nash equilibrium in this game exists and is unique. In equilibrium, firms’ markets overlap, a feature which accords with intuition and empirical observations. Over the interval between two firms, the equilibrium spatial price schedule is quasi-concave (quasi-convex) when transport costs are concave (convex). With linear transport costs, the model predicts uniform delivered pricing. Uniform pricing could moreover be obtained by a combination of increasing returns to volume in transportation together with concavity of unit transport costs in distance.     

SPATIAL PRICING IN INTERDEPENDENT MARHETS*

ABSTRACT. Conditions for spatial price equilibrium are derived for a set of firms in oligopolistic spatial competition, distributed at fixed locations in a heterogeneous region where consumer purchasing patterns are a probabilistic function of the price distribution rather than a deterministic function of proximity to firms. The resulting prices vary with accessibility to consumers or with the degree of local spatial monopoly, and result in non-zero profits for firms. Conditions describing the existence and stability properties of this spatial price equilibrium are defined, and are shown to be equivalent for two different hypotheses concerning disequilibrium pricing behavior: a partial price adjustment model and a Bertrand game. For two different profit goals, total profit maximization and profit rate maximization, it is shown that a spatial price equilibrium exists and is at least locally quasi-stable.     

中国产业在东亚的优势及结构调整

中国产业的发展已进入了按国际分工构来选择和实施战略性调整的关键时期。本文采用比较优势指数及贸易特化系数,分析了中国与东亚各国和地区贸易中工业制品的比较优势及竞争优势的状况,指出中国与东亚的产业国际分工的特征、竞争与互补关系以及如何重构中国产业竞争优势的问题。     

Competing hegemons? Chinese versus American geo-economic strategies in Africa

For the first time since the era of the slave trade, African trade is arguably re-orienting from the “Global North” to the “Global East.” Chinese investment and trade with Africa is rising quickly. At the same time, the U.S. has increased its strategic engagement with Africa very significantly since the terrorist attacks of 2001. As a consequence of this, the continent has moved centre stage in global oil and security politics. This paper investigates the nature of Chinese and American investment and trade in Africa; the ways in which these governments view the continent, and explores the economic and political impacts of enhanced geo-economic competition between the West and the East there. It finds that current trends are reworking the colonial trade structure, strengthening authoritarian states, and fuelling conflict. However, there are also progressive dimensions to the current conjuncture which could be built on with more robust international coordination and action.     

In the Shadow of Globalization: The European Community and the United States in the GATT Negotiations of the Tokyo Round (1973–1979)

This article explores the trade negotiations between the United States and the European Community in the Tokyo Round of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations, held in Geneva from 1973 to 1979. The article shows how the economic turbulence and the different domestic stances and policies toward the globalizing economy split the Western members of GATT into two camps. Countries, like France and the United Kingdom, less well equipped to face increased worldwide competition and the economic crisis were not keen on trade liberalization. Countries, like the United States and Germany, better equipped to face worldwide competition and in favour of policies that strengthened it, saw trade liberalization as the right path. Eventually, under US President Jimmy Carter's leadership and with the key support of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the results of the Round reflected a vote in favour of liberalizing international trade. Thus, the Round was shaped by the globalizing economy but, at the same time, its results gave further impetus to the globalization wave that would reach full swing in the 1980s–1990s. The GATT talks took place in the shadow of globalization: while attempting to govern the process, also built it up.     

ON THE IMPACT OF COMPETITION ON TRADE AND FIRM LOCATION

We study how the level of trade costs and the intensity of competition interact to explain the nature and intensity of trade within a given industry and the location of firms across countries. As trade costs decrease from very high to very low values, the global economy moves from autarky to two‐way trade, through one‐way trade from the larger to the smaller region. By exploring the intensive and extensive margins of exports, we investigate how the intensity of trade reacts to the degree of competitiveness. Furthermore, when firms are free to change location, they flow from the small to the large country, and the larger country is always a net exported on the manufactured good. Firms located in the big country have a bigger size than those located in the small one. Under one‐way trade, the relocation of firms changes their attitude toward export.     

Australia and the European Union: conflict,competition or engagement in agricultural and agri-food trade?

Many scholars have mounted convincing cases that the engagement of Australia and the European Union (EU) has been characterised by skirmishes regarding the Common Agricultural Policy and its distortion of world markets, and lack of Australian access to EU markets. This article illustrates that agricultural and agri-food trade constitutes a relatively small portion of Australia–EU trade flows; that Australia exports more goods to the EU than in the past; and that, in some agri-food sectors, it exports more goods to the EU than the EU does to Australia. Further, it argues that conflict and competition regarding the Common Agricultural Policy need to be understood in the broader context of world trade and in the context of a new and deeper engagement between the two interlocutors.     

产业集聚:地理学与经济学主流观点的对比

20世纪80年代以来,国际学术界出现了两种以企业行为的分析为基础解释产业空间集聚的"新经济地理学"理论模型:地理学中的"新经济与工业地理学"和经济学中的"地理经济学"。本文从理论起源、产业集聚的成因、市场结构的性质、外部经济的类型、交易关系与根植性、产业集聚的机制等方面对二者进行了系统的比较分析。     

European Integration and Industrial Relations: A Case of Variable Geometry?

This contribution considers the implications for industrial relations of European economic integration, and possible trade union responses. We can understand industrial relations as institutions and processes of social regulation of work and employment, whether by law, collective bargaining or more diffuse norms and standards (often, a combination of all three). These systems of worker protection became consolidated at national level; their foundations are eroded by increasing economic internationalisation (to which the European single market was a response, but which it further reinforced). Through the dynamic of "regime competition", multinational capital can play off national governments and national trade unions against one another, while norms of worker protection are subverted by growing insistence on "shareholder value". Effective regulation of work and employment must be reconstructed transnationally; but most trade union energy has been devoted to a vain pursuit of European analogues of national legislation and collective agreements within a bureaucratic elite process of "social dialogue". What is needed is, first, effective articulation between European-level trade union action and the day-to-day realities of national and workplace trade unionism, and second, a struggle to create a European civil society within which the protection of workers' rights can win popular support and which can sustain effective collective mobilisation.     

Canada’s Trade Policy: In Search of a Roadmap

This article examines Canada’s trade policy in light of efforts by the Harper government to respond to increasing global competition through the Global Markets Action Plan (2013). Through an analysis of three initiatives, the Canada–Korea Free Trade Agreement (CKFTA), the Canada–European Union Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA), and the Trans–Pacific Partnership (TPP), it becomes clear that Canada’s current strategy has only gone part of the way to enact policies that will be most beneficial to its economy. This article shows that Canada’s Global Markets Action Plan, though ambitious, does not correctly prioritize Canada’s interests: it gives too little attention to improving Canada’s strongest trading relationship with its immediate neighbors in North America; it does not comprehensively address the changing nature of trade (which is now focused on trade in value-added products); and finally, its almost singular focus on market access and increasing exports directs attention away from the type of liberalization that would be most beneficial to Canadians, which is opening up the market for imports and dismantling Canada’s supply management system.     

Contestability ‘theory’, its links with Australia’s competition policy,and recent international trade and investment agreements

This article examines how contestable market theory (contestability) has come to reconfigure the economic and regulatory concept of competition in order to enhance the compatibility of Australia’s economy with international trade and investment agreements. Australia has recently negotiated and signed a raft of bilateral, plurilateral and regional agreements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and the Australia–China Free Trade Agreement. In order to ensure that Australia meets its obligations and commitments to these agreements, two key advisory bodies—the Harper Panel on Competition Policy Review and the Financial System Inquiry—made recommendations, the majority of which were accepted by the government, to ready Australia’s competition governance and economic policy for greater global integration. Such impact is dependent on, among other things, how domestic competition policy meshes with the free market ideology underpinning such international agreements, which favours the breakdown of barriers to markets. Less well known is the role of contestability in radicalising ideology as it countenances monopolisation and privatisation in the guise of market access by justifying the substitution of actual competition with the mere threat of competition. The article concludes that the monopoly power of transnational corporations will be enhanced through the acquiescence of governments to the new governance regime of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which, supported by domestic policy, is set to redraw competition policy in the light of contestability theory.     

SPATIAL ENTRY DETERRENCE UNDER OLIGOPOLY*

ABSTRACT. This paper examines colluding, oligopolistic firms in a linear market. By assuming that rivals do not compete for consumers at their market boundaries, it is shown that an equilibrium exists without adopting a convex transportation cost function. Two price profiles are derived. The first describes firm prices in the absence of threatened entry. The second details profit-maximizing prices which forestall entrants. Given infinite relocation costs, threatened entry leads to price adjustments by the incumbent firms.