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I am doing some self-study on international trade theory, and have been using the book by Feenstra Advanced International Trade Theory as my textbook. The book is good and relatively rigorous, but my biggest problem is that the book does not give full mathematical derivations of its results. These derivations often involve subtle tricks and substitutions, and it is hard to follow the derivations if they are not explicitly given.

Here is an example from page 14 of the book, where the author gives the result of the derivation without the explicit derivation. What is more confusing is the author indicates that different tricks were used, like substituting for $p_i$ and muliplying and dividing, etc. I can work through replicating some of this on my own, but to read an entire textbook that way is going to take forever.

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Hence I was wondering if anyone could suggest a supplementary book that provides more of the complete mathematical derivations? I looked at the Krugman and Obstfeld book, but it does not seem to adhere to the same level of rigor as Feenstra. I really want to read research articles so I need to understand the details of the math.

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I do not think that there is such international trade book. What you need to do is to get a math textbook specifically written for economists that you can use as a reference any time you don't understand the math covered there.

My recommendation is EMEA and FMEA by Sydsæter et al. These were books I used during my undergraduate and graduate studies and they helped a lot. They have everything you need to understand Feenstra's excellent textbook.

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  • $\begingroup$ thanks for the response. Yeah, I see what you mean. I do have both of Sydsaeter's books and have gone through FMEA the most, since it has a really nice treatment of control theory for macroeconomics. Very helpful, his books are great. I can review both EMEA and FMEA again. Then perhaps I can through the Feenstra book a few times to get the gist of the models first, and finally I can do subsequent passes to fill in the derivations. The derivations are not very difficult, but it is hard to derive the model and try to understand the model at the same time. I'll try to understand the model first. $\endgroup$
    – krishnab
    Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 14:56

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