Explain the Gains from Trade and the Implications for Trade Negotiations.

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Trade is the action of buying and selling goods or services. There are many gains to be had from trade, both for the consumer and the producer. For producers , the primary motivation behind trade is comparative advantage and specialisation. David Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage explains that certain individuals or groups can perform particular economic activities (i.e. the provision of goods or services) more efficiently than others with a lower opportunity cost. In his example, he explained how Portugal is able to produce to produce both wine and cloth with less labour cost than England. In England, it is very hard to produce wine and only moderately difficult to produce cloth. However, if Portugal produces excess wine and trades it for English cloth, England then benefit from lower wine prices whilst still having the same costs for cloth (and vice versa) It is concluded that each country gains from specialising in the product or service in which they have a comparative advantage, and then trading it internationally for those in which they don’t.√ This is in contrast to absolute advantage; when an individual or group has the ability to produce a good or service using fewer resources than another.√ As this diagram below shows, by example of imports into the UK, trade creation means the consumers have access to a good but at a cheaper price.√ This decrease in price (P1 to EUp) will lead to an increase in quantity demanded (Qd1 to Qd2) and consumer surplus (the difference between the price a consumer is willing to pay and the actual price paid) will rise.√ Specialisation means that total output is increased and economic welfare can be increased. For trade to be mutually beneficial, a rate of exchange must be established. In the concept of comparative advantage, there are underlying assumptions such as transport costs being ignored; a
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