The Role of Information in Trade Theory

Abstract

In the conventional theory of international trade it is assumed that, world-wide, technical information available to one producer is freely and completely available to every other actual or potential producer; this is the assumption of open access. Evidently the assumption lies at one extreme of a continuum of possibilities. At the other extreme, world-wide, technical information is available to only one producer in each industry; this is the assumption of closed access.

In June 19511 arrived in Montreal to take up my first real job, as assistant professor at McGill. Jack Weldon was already there, having just completed the first year of a similar appointment. During the ensuing summer there developed a friendship which was to last for the next thirty-five years. It is with the greatest pleasure that I respond to the invitation of his colleagues to contribute to a memorial volume.

Jack Weldon was a first-rate creative theorist; recall that his article on Arrow’s impossibility theorem (1952) was written very early and essentially alone. However he was also a probing critic with a magnificent eye for hidden assumptions and unexplored possibilities. The topic of my chapter with Shigemi Yabuuchi would have appealed to him. (M. C. K.)