This study presents recently available data on the microstructure of Dutch exports and the relation between export participation and productivity at the firrm and establishment-level. We test whether recent theories of international trade with heterogeneous firms can explain the patterns in the...

This paper investigates the impact of the emergence of China and Eastern Europe as increasingly important players on the world market for a small open economy such as the Netherlands. We describe and compare in detail revealed comparative advantages across the different country groups. This...

The financial crisis is still spreading and deepening and is making inroads on the real economy. Forecasting is always "work in progress" but the exceptional situation today makes it feel like shooting at a moving target from a ship on the high seas. The forecasts of the Working Group were...

This paper has two aims. First, it describes CPB's contribution on bilateral services trade data to version 7 of the GTAP database. Among others, it uses reliability indices to determine the quality of the data reported by exporting and importing countries. Second, this paper discusses briefly...

Good statistical measurement of services trade becomes more and more important now trade in services gets the attention of policymakers. In 1995 many countries decided to liberalise services trade according to the General Agreement for Trade in Services (GATS). Also in the Doha round the WTO...

This paper analyses the export market entry decisions of Dutch firms and their subsequent growth or market exit. When entering new markets, firms have to learn market conditions and have to search for new trade relations under uncertainty. We show that firms follow a stepping stone approach for...

Using Dutch transaction-level data on international trade we find that the intensive margin drives Dutch trade growth year by year. After 6 years, new trade relations cover about 50 percent of Dutch exports. Each year 40 percent of the relations are new, but only 25 percent survives after two...

In GRAVITY WITH GRAVITAS: A SOLUTION TO THE BORDER PUZZLE, Anderson and Van Wincoop (2003) estimate what trade between US states and Canadian provinces would have been if the border between Canada and the United States had not existed. They showed that computing the border effect requires...

This paper empirically explores the relationship between competition design and productive efficiency in the railway industry. We use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to construct efficiency scores, and explain these scores, using variables reflecting institutional factors and competition...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the contribution of Information Communication and Technology (ICT) to labour productivity growth in the 1990s, using an extensive panel of firm-level data for Dutch market services. We estimate enhanced production function models that include ICT...