On the similarity of country endowments

Abstract

We study the production side of the Heckscher–Ohlin model empirically. The evidence we present suggests that the endowments of countries around the world are too dissimilar for all countries to be able to produce the same set of goods. In contrast, the endowments of the rich OECD countries are sufficiently similar, so that these countries do not have to specialize in different subsets of goods. Our findings have implications for a variety of issues ranging from the trade and wages debate to economic development. Our analysis relies on the lens condition of Deardorff [Journal of International Economics 36 (1994) 167–175] that compares country endowments with sectoral factor inputs. We mainly focus on the production factors capital and labor. We test the robustness of the results with different data sets and with corrections for international differences in productivity and human capital. We confirm the similarity of the developed OECD countries with skilled and unskilled labor data. We also investigate in detail the implications of measurement error and sectoral aggregation.