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This paper looks at some aspects of trade and investment relations between the EU and the countries of central and eastern Europe (CEEC). The approach used is based on a model of trade with, and development of, a frontier by a metropolitan economy developed by Ronald Findlay. Findlay’s model posits the existence of a monopolised supply of an input to the metropolitan economy. Development of the frontier enables the metropolitan economy to break the monopoly. The expansion of outward processing trade between the EU and the CEEC, a form of intra‐industry trade, is a notable feature of economic relations in Europe since the fall of the Soviet empire. This is modelled in the paper as a device whereby a supply side constraint (labour market restrictions) within the EU is relaxed by vertical disintegration of production and relocation outside the EU. This in turn has implications for the incorporation of the CEEC in the EU. While they remain outside the EU they provide regime competition, particularly in the area of labour market policy. The income distribution implications of this competition provides a political basis for moves to extend membership of the EU on the basis of the CEEC’s adopting the acquis communautaire.

A review essay on Ronald Findlay, Lars Jonung and Mats Lundahl, eds. Bertil Ohlin: Centennial Celebration (1899–1999). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. xvi, 546. $60.00. The Swedish economist Bertil Ohlin was born in 1899 and died in 1979. Less than half of his professional life he spent as a full time academic scholar in economics. He was a student at the University of Stockholm and was supervised by his teachers, Gustav Cassel and Eli Heckscher. In 1922, Ohlin presented his licentiat thesis where he set out the ideas later conceptualised as the Heckscher-Ohlin model. Two years later, in 1924, he took his doctoral degree under Cassel with a dissertation simply called Handelns teori (The Theory of Trade). A longer version of this dissertation was later published in English as Interregional and International Trade (1933). This work made him a famous trade theorist in a line of tradition going back to Ricardo and Torrens. Paul Samuelson in 1941 coined and immortalised the term “the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem” which he and Wolfgang Stolper developed further in a famous article in the Review of Economic Studies (1941) entitled “Protection and Real Wages.” Already at the age of 26 the bright young man Ohlin became a professor in economics at the University of Copenhagen and five years later he was appointed to a chair in the same subject at Handelshogskolan (The Stockholm School of Economics) in Stockholm.

This chapter presents a general equilibrium model that embeds the issue of national security within a two-country Heckscher–Ohlin model of international trade. “National security” is defined as a public good that is an increasing function of a country's own defense expenditure and a decreasing function of the other country's defense expenditure. Defense is a non-traded public good produced by capital and labor, along with two tradable private goods in each country. The model is solved as a Nash equilibrium in defense expenditures and a Walrasian equilibrium for the two traded goods and the factors of production. It is shown that opening to international trade raises defense expenditures in each country since national security is a normal good in each of them. If defense is more capital-intensive than both tradable goods then trade lowers the cost of defense for the labor-abundant country and raises it for the capital-abundant country.

The purpose of this paper is to develop principles through which the global economic structure could become more equal and just; it begins by demonstrating that world poverty is pervasive, and that the global economic structure is very unequal.

The paper utilizes conceptual/theoretical arguments in welfare economics, utilitarianism, Sen's capability approach, and Rawlsian theories of justice to argue that none of those theories can lead to a more equal global economic structure. Thus, the development of more egalitarian principles is needed.

Arguing that the principles that Rawls developed in his 1999 The Law of Peoples are more egalitarian than the other theories, the paper still finds them less than adequate. However, the principles developed in the paper can lead the world toward a more just and much more egalitarian economic structure.

Since the principles developed in the paper are more egalitarian, helping toward ending world poverty and extreme inequality, the paper and its findings constitute an original and a valuable contribution.

With the development of economic globalization and the growth of cross-border technology flow, the internationalization of innovation has become an important strategy for enterprises in global competition for both investment optimization and technological advancement. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the research evolution in internationalization of innovation, investigate the hot spot transformation, and predict the future research trends.

The main research approaches in this study are literature co-citation analysis and keyword co-occurrence analysis. Co-citation is applied as a semantic similarity measure for related papers that makes use of citation relationships. Co-occurrence frequency analysis of keywords is also carried out to reveal the hot spots in research of internationalization of innovation. With the data downloaded from Web of Science, Citespace was used as a tool of scientometrics to visualize the node papers, knowledge mapping and keyword co-occurrence ranking in different stages of research evolution. The literature being analyzed in this study come from paper collection by searching the titles, abstracts and keywords, for terms that include “international innovation”, “international R&D”, “international technology”, “globalizational innovation”, “globalizational R&D”, “globalizational technology”, “multinational innovation”, “multinational R&D” and “multinational technology”.

The investigation reveals that there are two distinct stages in research evolution of the internationalization of innovation. The direction of innovation diffusion has turned from “one-way trickle down from developed countries” to “two-way interaction between developed countries and emerging countries”. Meanwhile, the research hotspots have been transformed since 2000 from “detail and operation-focused” to “profound and strategy-focused”.

The paper gives an insight into the internationalization of innovation field using literature from the Web of Science as an illustration.

The Covid-19 pandemic has rekindled interest in sovereign debt crises amidst calls for debt relief for developing and emerging countries. But has debt relief lessened the debt burdens of emerging and developing economies? The purpose of this paper is to empirically address this question. In particular, the focus is on the implications of debt relief and institutional qualities for sovereign debt in emerging and developing economies.

The model extends the framework on the probability of default by incorporating the receipt of debt relief by a debtor country. Doing so allows to better explain movements of sovereign defaults relating to debt relief. The model is estimated via the regular probit regression.

The analysis shows that the debt relief provided, thus, far, failed to ease the debt overhang problems of developing and emerging countries and reduced investment. The current debt relief schemes may underscore the prospects of self-enforcing and self-fulfilling sovereign debt crises rather than eliminating the dilemma completely. Regarding the forms of debt relief, the analysis shows that debt forgiveness offers favourable prospects in terms of debt sustainability and economic outcomes than debt rescheduling. Perhaps, the sovereign debt crises, particularly in low-income countries, hinge on insolvency problems rather than transitory illiquidity issues.

Any debt relief mechanism should consider seriously the potential incentive effect that reinforces expectations of future debt-relief initiatives. Importantly, solving the sovereign debt problem requires a programme for sustained investment and economic growth, while not discounting the critical role of prudent debt management policies and institutions.

This study contributes a different angle to the debate on sovereign debt distress. Aside from the structural and economic factors, this study investigates the role of debt management policy in the debtor nation and the implications of debt relief benefits for sovereign risk. The framework also focuses on whether the different forms of debt relief exert distinctive impacts.