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...

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...

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...

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...

Skilled labor earnings differentials decreased during the trade liberalization implemented in Brazil from 1988 to 1995. This paper investigates the role of trade liberalization in explaining these relative earnings movements. We perform several independent empirical exercises that check the...

This paper contributes to the literature on firms’ productivity and exporting decisions by analysing the role played by organizational choice aspects. Rather than setting up a vertically integrated structure, manufacturers may act as subcontractors in both domestic and foreign markets, and...

The Grossman and Helpman (1994) model explains tariffs as the outcome of a lobbying game between special interests and the government. Most empirical implementations of this framework use instead non-tariff barriers to measure the extent of protection. Importantly, while the former set of...

This paper examines the trade policy response of Latin American governments to the rapid growth of China and India in world markets. To explain higher protection in sectors where a large share is imported from these countries, we extend the `protection for sale\' model to allow for di®erent...