International Trade Theory and Policy

Abstract

There is no lack of good international economics textbooks ranging from the elementary to the advanced, so that an additional drop in this ocean calls for an explanation. In the present writer’s opinion, there seems still to be room for a textbook which can be used in both undergraduate and graduate courses and which contains a wide range of topics, including those usually omitted from other textbooks. These are the intentions behind the present book, which is an outcrop from undergraduate and graduate courses in international economics that the author has been holding at the Sapienza University of Rome and other universities from 1974 to 2010 and from his ongoing research work in this field. Accordingly, the work is organised as two-books-in-one by distributing the material between text and appendices. The treatment in the text is directed to undergraduate students and is mainly confined to graphic analysis and to some elementary algebra, but it is assumed that the reader will have a basic knowledge of microeconomics (so that the usual review material on production functions, indifference curves, etc. is omitted). Each chapter has a mathematical appendix, where (i) the topics treated in the text are examined at a level suitable for advanced undergraduate or first-year graduate students and (ii) generalisations and/or topics not treated in the text (including some at the frontiers of research, whose often obscure mathematical aspects are fully clarified) are formally examined. The text is self-contained, and the appendices can be read independently of the text and can, therefore, also be used by students who already know ‘graphic’ international economics and want to learn something about its mathematical counterpart. Of course the connections between text and appendices are carefully indicated, so that the latter can be used as mathematical appendices by the student who has mastered the text and the text can be used as graphic and literary exposition of the results derived mathematically in the appendices by the student who has mastered these.