We exploit a panel dataset of Hungarian firms merged with product-level trade data for the period 1992-2003 to investigate the relation between firms' trading activities (importing, exporting or both) and productivity. We find important self-selection effects of the most productive firms induced...

"Building on Eaton and Kortum's (2002) model of Ricardian trade, Alvarez and Lucas (2005) calculate that a small country representing 1% of the world's GDP experiences a gain of 41% as it goes from autarky to frictionless trade with the rest of the world. But the gains from openness, which...

The theoretical linkages between openness and long-run economic growth are established with the development of new growth theories. In this literature, it has been shown that openness affects economic growth through a number of channels and the direction of this effect is closely related to the...

One of the many new publications dealing with the reform of the International trade system is the report of the Trade Policy Research Centre "Towards an Open World Economy". The following article analyses and criticises the main proposals of the report.

This essay examines the implications of openness to trade, capital mobility, and exchange rate exibility for the fiscal multiplier. It presents a New Open Economy Macroeconomics model which is extended with the formation of 'deep habits' by individual households. Hereby, an inter-temporal...

We show that the composition of imports has important implications for the optimal volatility of the exchange rate. Using input-output data for 25 countries we document substantial differences in the import and non-tradable content of final demand components, and in the role played by imported...