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 report presents descriptive evidence of specialisation trends and investigates empirically their causes and consequences, analysing the role of policies in this process. Then, based on the insights from the backward looking analysis, it draws global trade and specialisation scenarios up to...

This paper presents descriptive evidence of specialisation trends and investigates empirically their causes and consequences, analysing the role of policies in this process. Then, based on the insights from the backward looking analysis, it draws global trade and specialisation scenarios up to...

Brazil, like other natural resource-exporting countries, has benefited from a sharp increase in commodity prices over the last few years. To investigate the possible impact of terms-of-trade gains on the real economy, this paper estimates normalised quadratic input demand and output supply...

France has seen a marked deterioration in its export performance in the last 10 years or so. Previous empirical research pointed out that weak export performance was due to i) vigorous domestic demand; ii) lower mark-ups due to head-to-head competition with Germany; iii) low non-price...

This paper presents new estimates of country-specific international transport costs for 21 OECD countries over the period 1973-2005. The methodology is based on direct measures of air, maritime, and road transport costs rather than on cif/fob ratios or other balance of payments data employed in...

Since the beginning of the decade, France has seen a marked decline in its export performance, leading to growing concerns on the part of the authorities and of civil society about the economy’s capacity to adapt to the intensified globalisation of trade and investment in goods and services....

Several studies have reported a large negative effect of national borders on the volume of trade. We provide new estimates of the border effect for continental Europe using road rather than great circle – or “as-crows-fly” – distance. Road distances for 48 180 European city pairs have...

This paper first provides a brief overview of the literature on market segmentation and then presents an empirical exercise that sheds more light on the significance of border effects across European countries. The literature suggests that integration in the EU goods and financial markets is...

Danish productivity has grown only weakly over the past two decades, both historically and in relation to other countries, despite sound policies and institutions. At the same time, the country has lost export market shares. Denmark needs to continue its efforts to reap the benefits of...