This paper utilizes a many-country, many-product Ricardian trade model to evaluate the
usefulness of measures of revealed comparative advantage (RCA) in academic and policy analyses.
I find that, while commonly used indexes are generally not consistent with theoretical
notions of comparative advantage, certain indexes can be usefully employed for certain tasks.
I explore several common uses of RCA indexes and show that different indexes are appropriate
when attempting to (a) evaluate the differential effect of changes in trade barriers across
producers of different products, (b) identify countries who are relatively close competitors in a
given market, or (c) recover patterns of relative productivity.