Teaching and Learning Alternatives to a Comparative Advantage Motivation for Trade

What is it about?

Introductory economics courses emphasize opportunity cost, comparative advantage and specialization to show the benefits of trade. We assert that this emphasize leads to erroneous student mindset that trade requires specialization based on comparative advantage. We test students who have been exposed to the typical textbook and classroom presentation of specialization and trade with real but paradoxical situations where the same goods are both imported and exported by a country. Students are found to generally understand comparative advantage calculations but wrongfully apply the idea to this multiproduct trade situation for which specialization is not relevant.

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Why is it important?

This study looks at one example of a larger pedagogy that is reinforced by momentum, standards, competencies and other rigidities in teaching practices that become entrenched in textbooks and other teaching materials. The main issue is that this systematic approach is miss directed, as demonstrated by the case study in this paper, and has a tendency to leave students with misunderstandings of core ideas in economic and when they can be appropriately applied.