| Sumario: | u252Recently Chipman [2] has brought to light Mill's Law of International Value and has shown Mill's much discredited argument to be not only correct, but to contain "... a convincing proof (admittedly for a special case) of the existence of equilibrium ... in terms of what can today be recognized as an ingenious and correct solution of a problem in nonlinear programming" [2, p. 484]. As Chipman suggests, Mill does treat a very special case; he assumes two countries, two goods, and utility functions for both countries of the form U = X<SUB1>X<SUB2>. The purpose of this paper is to extend Mill's Law by relaxing, in turn, all three of these assumptions. <BR> While Mill's model with its linear transformation curves is no longer widely used in either theoretical or empirical studies in international economics, some recent research suggests that this model may still have some practical importance. Johnson [5] has shown that only when factor intensities differ widely does the transformation locus differ markedly from a straight line. He suggests that it may be "... that the constant cost assumptions of Ricardo, Graham and the Leontief model are quite reasonable approximations for most practical purposes, and that the effort that has been devoted to refining the Heckscher-Ohlin model and investigating its complexities has been concerned with phenomena of trivial practical importance" [5, p. 679].
|