Competitiveness has come to the forefront of the policy debate within the European Union, focusing on price competitiveness and intra-EU imbalances. But how to measure competitiveness properly, beyond price or cost competitiveness, remains an open methodological issue; and how can we explain the...

Countries no longer specialise in products or sectors, but in varieties of the same product (sold at different prices). To study the way in which the European Union copes with the emergence of new big world exporters in this context, we analyse the redistribution of world market shares at the...

Export and import price indices are useful instruments in international economics. We document here TradePrices, our database of aggregated and sectoral trade price indices for all countries, computed using unit values given by BACI, the CEPII’s database of international trade at the...

This paper documents the construction of BACI, our international trade database, which covers more than 200 countries and 5,000 products, between 1994 and 2007. New approaches have been developed to reconcile data reported by almost 150 countries to the United Nations Statistics Division,...

This paper questions whether the overseas expansion of a country’s retailers fosters overall bilateral exports towards these host markets. To address this question, we consider an empirical trade model, where the foreign sales of multinational retailers reduce the fixed and variable trade...

We revisit competitiveness issues using recent data and show that the global financial crisis has taken a toll on European producers that before 2007 were maintaining their market positions. The EU competitiveness in goods has recently deteriorated, even in the upper and high-tech segments of...

GeoDist makes available the exhaustive set of gravity variables used in Mayer and Zignago (2005). GeoDist provides several geographical variables, in particular bilateral distances measured using citylevel data to assess the geographic distribution of population inside each nation. We have...

After a long period of domination by the industrialised countries of the North, international trade is today driven by the dynamism of developing countries. This work seeks to analyse how the EU is performing in the light of this emerging competitive threat, by comparing the EU’s export...