We argue that, in the presence of asymmetric countries, a trade agreement that conforms to GATT’s reciprocity rule allows the (stronger) less trade dependent country to improve its welfare relative to both the free trade and the trade war. Conversely, the (weaker) more trade dependent country...

The aim of the paper is firstly provision of an analysis of the perception of the EU a year after the accession. It is shown that the population of the Czech Republic is shortly after accession rather sceptic about the EU integration. This serves as a context for a discussion the European...

In the past he EU has taken up an ever more important role in matters of cohesion policy. The objectives and principles of EU cohesion policy have been given a strong constitutional basis. We describe the development of this EU constitutional frame in the first section. We then turn our...

In this comment I will only tackle the growth problem - the big target that (up to now) the EU has missed - fully sharing the view of the Report that, without a more sustained growth, both cohesion and stability are at stake. In particular, I will concentrate on the US-EU comparison, which is...

In most destination countries, immigration policies are increasingly tilted toward the most skilled individuals. Whether this shift hurts economic prospects in sending countries, as argued by the traditional brain drain literature, is somewhat controversial. The most recent literature has...

Why do we observe some LDCs objecting the prospect of a Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), although they have been keen to liberalize investment in preferential agreements in recent years? In this paper, we analyse the issue of MAI implementation and assess the welfare consequences of...

This paper examines the impact of trade and fiscal reforms and of the 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc on enterprise development in Chad and Gabon. These reforms provide a natural experiment to assess the impact of trade liberalisation in countries with a small and backward manufacturing...

This paper presents a counterexample to the Miyagiwa (1991) claim that discriminatorygovernment procurement policy is ineffective as a protectionist device, when the goods are alsoconsumed by the private sector. The procurement sector is a homogeneous product Cournot-Nashduopoly, with a home and...

Current trade policies of European Union and United States stresses establishing free trade arrangements (FTAs) with partners all over the world with special emphasis to developing countries. Besides geo-political aspects, the most important motivation include improvement in foreign market...

The number of preferential trade agreements has greatly increased over the past two decades, yet most existing bilateral arrangements take the form of free trade areas, and less than ten percent can be considered to be fully fledged customs unions. This paper develops a political economy model...