Weak Links in (Inter-) National Trade

It has long been recognized that linkages across different sectors of an economy can play a crucial role for aggregate productivity. When production requires several stages, low productivity sectors, the "weak links" of an economy, drag down the productive capacity of other sectors as well. In how far can International Trade help poor countries
to mitigate the low productivity of "weak links"? How are the domestic misallocation of resources, aggregate productivity and the extend of international trade related? This paper analyzes these questions, building a quantitiative Neoricardian multi-country model of trade, calibrating the model to the data, following the computational algorithm proposed by Alvarez and Lucas (2007).