This report assesses conceptually and empirically the extent to which the stringency of environmental regulations drives international trade in environmental goods. Many of the measures governments adopt to address issues such as local air and water pollution or GHG emissions take the form of...

This report examines the different channels through which trade openness (and reforms to achieve it) can affect a country’s food security. The overall conclusion is that trade openness has a positive net impact on food security, although specific constituencies, including some poor households,...

This paper quantifies the importance of different determinants of trade at the industry level using a sample of 54 OECD and non-OECD economies. The empirical methodology extends the approach of previous empirical studies to explicitly quantify the impact that trading partners’ factor...

This paper provides a detailed description of recent research to re-estimate and re-specify the international trade volume and price equations that are used in the OECD Economics Department to analyse and project international trade developments. The set of countries covered by the estimations...

Gravity models are used to explore the determinants of trade, making use of fixed effect linear estimators and a Poisson estimator (as in Santos Silva and Tenreyro, 2006) with fixed effects. Beyond usual determinants of trade such as GDP, distance, contiguity, free trade areas and language, this...

This study empirically investigates key restrictions to the internationalisation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in manufacturing and across different types of services. The study explores the extent to which binding constraints faced by SMEs producing goods may differ from small...

This paper examines the importance of buyer-supplier relationships, geography and the structure of the production network in firm performance. We develop a simple model where firms can outsource tasks and search for suppliers in different locations. Low search and outsourcing costs lead firms to...

We critically review the recent literature on currency unions and discuss the methodological challenges posed by the empirical assessment of their costs and benefits. In the process, we provide evidence on the economic effects of the euro. In particular, and in contrast with estimates of the...

The year 2000 was exceptionally good for the transition countries. The region as a whole expanded faster than the world economy average. However, the favourable external climate has started to deteriorate rapidly and especially the current pronounced weakening of the EU economy is worrying. The...

This report gives an overview of patterns of structural change in Central and Eastern European economies over the decade 1989-1999. The analysis in this paper is restricted to a sub-sample of transition economies, namely the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEECs) - with the exception of...