Trade versus Investment Liberalization

Despite several theoretical contributions and considerable informal empirical evidence" to the contrary, a notion that trade and investment are substitutes persists in trade policy" analysis. This paper considers the liberalization of commodity trade versus liberalization" allowing direct investment versus the two together. For a relatively skilled-labor-scarce" economy, I show that trade and investment liberalization are quite different together are in a sense complements. The intuition may be that direct investment provides such" a country with crucial inputs (knowledge-intensive producer services) without which the" country cannot effectively exploit its abundant factors in certain industries."