Christopher Bliss has continued his research on international trading arrangements. Work in progress models trade liberalization which has to be negotiated, because free trade is not, or is not perceived to be, to the benefit of the individual country alone. In that context freedom of trade should be qualified by environmental, or similar, considerations. The possibility that slack environmental regulation will substitute for trade promotion by subsidy or protection should be taken into account by rational trade negotiators and may lead to them negotiating for less liberal trade than would be right if everything could be negotiated. A paper is being prepared for publication.
A new project considers the long-run evolution of income distribution for family units, or countries, in a world in which capital is invested internationally in a pooled fund. It emerges that income distributions tend to be very stable, that there is no innate tendency to convergence, and that long-run income distributions may depend chiefly on random events such as family ruin national disasters or windfalls. A paper with these results was given at the Econometric Society European Meeting at Maastricht, in August 1994.
Publications
'Oil Trade and General Equilibrium', Journal of International and Comparative Economics, 2, 1993.
Economic Theory and Policy for Trading Blocks. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.