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The Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 53 No. 4 1971

Foreign Competition and Domestic Industry Profitability

Louis Esposito; Frances Ferguson Esposito

Abstract

R ECENT studies investigating the variability in inter-industry profit rates largely ignore the influence of actual and potential foreign competition [2, 5, 6, 15, 171. This paper examines the influence of foreign competition on industry profitability and concludes that such competition, as represented by the level of imports, appears to exert a significant and negative effect on industry profit rates. The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that less restrictive trade policies encourage more competitive pricing behavior in domestic industries. Section I of this paper develops the analytical framework within which to view potential foreign competition. Section II describes the model and presents the major empirical results. Section III discusses the implications of the empirical results with respect to foreign trade policies.

DOI
10.2307/1928735
Volume
53
Issue
4
Pages
343
Sources
openalex crossref

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