Complete Specialization in Classical Economics

Takashi Negishi and Takashi Negishi
Additional contact information
Takashi Negishi: The Japan Academy
Takashi Negishi: The University of Tokyo

Chapter Chapter 19 in Developments of International Trade Theory, 2014, pp 151-165 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The so-called modern interpretation of Ricardian theory of comparative advantage results in the drastic conclusion that each country (England or Portugal) specializes entirely in the production of a single commodity (cloth or wine). But Ricardo himself was merely concerned with marginal adjustments of production to the given terms of trade in his famous theory of gains from foreign trade. Ricardo has nothing to do with the complete specialization. It was J. S. Mill, however, who used the assumption of the complete specialization skillfully to determine the terms of trade uniquely in his theory of the reciprocal demand. Classical economists, including Bastable and W. T. Thornton, critically discussed many important aspects of Mill’s theory, but they did not seem to raise the objection to Mill’s assumption of entire specialization. It was Pareto, a neoclassical economist, who presented a numerical example for which the assumption is inappropriate.

Keywords: Specialization; Comparative Advantage; Linear Programming; Reciprocal Demand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:advchp:978-4-431-54433-3_19

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9784431544333

DOI: 10.1007/978-4-431-54433-3_19

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Advances in Japanese Business and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().