Essays on international trade

Chapter 1. Producer services, trade, and wages. The purpose of this chapter is to study issues concerning international trade in manufacturing and services. Producer services such as communications and information services are essential inputs for manufacturing, and they seem to have two important aspects. First, the costs of producer services are mainly fixed costs for manufacturing. Secondly, producer services are relatively skilled labor intensive as compared with other goods. I develop a model with producer services having the two aspects to analyze the structure of international trade. International trade is shown to be composed of two components, vertical trade in manufacturing and services, and horizontal trade in manufacturing. I show that each trade component has a different impact on real income and income distribution in trading countries.; Chapter 2. Competition, technology, and trade in oligopolistic industries. This chapter develops a model with Cournot oligopoly to investigate the nature of trade in oligopolistic industries. I allow countries to be asymmetric in the two aspects of oligopolistic sectors, the number of firms and the technology of production. If countries have identical technologies, the number of firms plays an important role in explaining the nature of trade. I show that a country with the relatively greater number of firms is a net exporter. This result implies a positive relation between the level of competition and the value of exports. I show how this relation is undermined by a difference in production technology between countries.; Chapter 3. Vertical intra-industry trade and factor proportions . The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the pattern and volume of vertical intra-industry trade. The exchange of intermediate goods for final goods produced with the intermediate goods is vertical intra-industry trade since the intermediate goods and the final goods are classified in the same industry. I extend the Heckscher-Ohlin model to a setting in which countries have different production technologies in intermediate goods. With this model, I show that the share of vertical intra-industry trade in the total volume of trade does not necessarily reach a peak at a point where countries have identical factor endowment ratios.