ABSTRACT
‘Comparative costs and commercial policy’ is a general title, designed to comprise the ‘real’ side of the theory of international trade. I shall divide my discussion of it into three parts. The first section will be on the theory of international trade as it has come to be expounded in international economics in recent years. This will deal with comparative costs, and with the causes of trade and the effects of international trade on prices of goods and factors of production. The second section will be concerned with the theory of commercial policy, that is, of tariffs and other kinds of trade barriers like quantitative restrictions. The third section will be concerned very briefly with what I regard as the major new development in international trade theory, the theory of customs unions and preferential groups, a theory which has been developed practically entirely since the war.
