Perkembangan Terbaru Teori Perdagangan Internasional

During the last two decades, there have been fundamental changes in international trade. World trade gravity has shifted from the Translantic to Pasific, accomppanied by the importance of Japan in world trade and the emerging of Asian NICS (Korea, Hongkong, Taiwan and Singapore). The Structure of commodities traded has also changed due to, among others, technological development. Along with those development the importance of transnational corporation has also been growing. Protectionism, however has also been flourishing, and lead to move severe market imperfection. These development have impaired the ability of previous theories of international trade in explaining patterns and benefits of international trade. Consequently, their predicting ability have been reduced. This article tries to review some of recent development in theories of international trade. Even though most of these theories fail to present a more applicative models for developing countries, some aspects of these models could be used to explain (or at least to understand) trade patterns in relation to economic development in LDC's. Theories reviewed in this article include inter-industry trade, technological gap and product cycle hyphothesis and trade in services. Methods for calculating performance, an indicator for comparative advantage, and its results for Indonesian export is also presented.