This paper takes a welfare-view on eastern enlargement of the EU, focusing on incumbent countries. Enlargement is decomposed into three elements: Single-market integration on commodity markets, budgetary costs from EU-expenditure policies, and singlemarket- induced migration from new to present...

Using the border effect approach, our paper examines the influence of the legal framework quality of the Central and Eastern European countries on international trade. This approach offers an evaluation of the borders? impact on trade. A market is fragmented when actual trade differs from the...

We study the impact of changing relative market access in an enlarged EU on the economies of incumbent Objective 1 regions. First, we track the impact of external opening on internal spatial configurations in a three-region economic geography model. External opening gives rise to potentially...

This paper tests a geography and growth model using regional data for Europe, the US, and Japan. We set up a standard geography and growth model with a poverty trap and derive a log-linearized growth equation that corresponds directly to a threshold regression technique in econometrics. In...

The global welfare implications of home market effects in trade models with imperfect competition are little understood. This paper proposes a simple model in which such implications can be easily analyzed. It shows an overall tendency of imperfectly competitive sectors to inefficiently cluster...

New Economic Geography (NEG) has reached a theoretical consolidation while related empirical tests are still scarce. The present paper aims at providing some evidence on the validity of forces emphasised by NEG. The analysis starts from the nominal wage equation derived from the Krugman...

This paper extends an economic geography model by tariffs to analyze their impact on welfare and sustainability of agglomerations. Policies with and without cooperation are compared, with the goal of maximizing aggregated welfare in the former and regional welfare in the latter case. The main...

In this paper we describe the development of regional specialisation and geographical concentration in Germany between 1993 and 2001. Somewhat contrary to theoretical expectations derived from the recent literature in location theory, we neither find compelling evidence for a specialisation...

In Africa there has been an immense effort in the past, continuing into the present, to unite politically and to build numerous economic integration areas. In this paper we discuss the reasons for the existence of this phenomenon in Africa which we call the drive to political and economic...

The EAC is on the verge of establishing a customs union. But this is accompanied by fears that the Customs Union would lead to trade imbalances among the Partner States, which would create serious problems for the proper functioning of the Customs Union itself. To mitigate these problems the...