Ricardo's Theory of Comparative Advantage: Old Idea, New Evidence

摘要

The anecdote is famous. A mathematician, Stan Ulam, once challenged Paul Samuelson to name one proposition in the social sciences that is both true and nontrivial. His reply was: "Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage"; see Samuelson (1995, p. 22). Truth, however, in Samuelson's reply refers to the fact that Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage is mathematically correct, not that it is empiri cally valid. The goal of our paper is to assess the empirical performance of Ricardo's ideas.