Two friends Claire and Thomas work for a textbook publisher. They have a day to write exercises for the publisher’s new Math and Economics workbooks. Each one can allocate 8 hours that day to writing (and solving) the exercises they dream up. The following table shows how many hours it takes each of one of them to compose one exercise, based on the subject matter.
Hours per Math Exercise Hours per Econ Exercise
Claire 0.5 0.5
Thomas 4 1
1.Who has a comparative advantage in writing Math exercises?
2. Who has a comparative advantage in writing Econ exercises?
3. If they were to trade and specialize, how many Math exercises can they write in total?
4. If they were to trade and specialize, how many Econ exercises can they write in total?