Foreign direct investment has been of great importance in economic growth and global economic integration over the last decades. South East Asia has been part of this development with rapidly increasing inflows of FDI. However, there are large variations over time and between countries in the...

The current political turmoil in the Arab world has contributed to renewed interest in the Barcelona Process. This paper explores whether deeper integration in the form of trade facilitation – i.e. improved and simplified trade procedures – could be an important part of a reform agenda....

A main component of customs unions is a common trade policy on imports from non-member countries. Trade policy covers both tariff and non-tariff barriers like trade procedures. We argue that since trade procedures vary markedly across EU countries, the EU is not, strictly speaking, a customs...

The literature on trade facilitation has mostly focused on implications for trade volumes. However, recent theoretical contributions have emphasized that trade costs – such as transaction costs related to cross-border trade procedures – affect both the traded volumes of “old” goods (the...

This paper concerns the design of a trading mechanism for a group of traders when their valuations of the good are private information and they bargain over who shall consume more than his initial endowment and who shall consume less. It is shown that there generally exists a set of initial...

Since at least the 1960s, the European Union (EU) has offered various kinds of non-reciprocal trade preferences for developing countries. Originally, these trade preferences had at least two policy goals: (i) to increase export volumes for developing countries and thereby boost their export...

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This paper examines the intensive and extensive margins of carbon leakage. The analysis uses an increase in the Swedish electricity price to identify the impact on imports at the firm and product level. Our model of heterogenous firms predicts that higher domestic electricity prices lead firms...

Trading nations exchange tariff concessions in the context of trade liberalizing rounds. Tariffs, nonetheless, are not the only instrument affecting the value of a concession. Domestic instruments affect it as well, but public order is not negotiable, and, consequently, is not scheduled. Public...

This paper develops an improved test of economic convergence or divergence using time series methods. The usefulness of the method is illustrated in an analysis of the growth pattern between Chinese regions in 1952–2007. Comparing all combinations of regional pairs, the analysis yields support...