The commodity pattern of trade and the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem in the presence of aggregate and commodity-specific factor-intensity reversals

Theoretical analyses of the HO theorem's prediction of the commodity pattern of trade in the multicommodity two-factor model tend to assume away factor-intensity reversals, but the empirical literature has investigated whether reversals between individual goods' technologies are prevalent phenomena with the evidence then being presented as bearing upon the HO theorem. Since the consequence of a factor-intensity reversal for the theorem is well defined in the (2 × 2 × 2) model, we establish via aggregation over individual goods' technologies an analogue (2 × 2 × 2) setting for the multicommodity model. The implications of factor-intensity reversals in commodity-specific technologies for the reversal behavior of the aggregate technologies and for the HO theorem are examined. Commodity-specific reversals such as are the focus of the empirical studies are shown to have no direct bearing upon the theorem.