This course has been divided into three axes.

The first lessons aim to understand the existence and configuration of international trade. It is therefore a question of showing why specialized countries have an interest in specializing and exchanging different goods, then why countries with similar factor endowments will exchange similar products. Then, we will see that the capacity of a country to export, and therefore to profit from international trade, is determined by the productivity of companies.

The second pair of lessons seek to explain and describe the internationalization of production. This is to show that a product is the process of different stages within a value chain and that it can be profitable to locate these different stages in different countries.

The third lessons tackle the debate around « free trade / protectionism », focusing both on the advantages of free trade, its disadvantages justifying recourse to protectionism, and on the limited of the latter.