This paper uses firm level panel data to investigate empirically the effects of direct foreign investment (DFI) on the productivity performance of domestic firms in three emerging economies of Central and Eastern Europe, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland. To this end a unique firm level panel data...

Developing countries have increasingly engaged in Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) to attract foreign investors. While it is found that BITs are successful in attracting FDI, we argue that the effectiveness of BITs depends on the type of FDI. We find the effect of BITs to differ importantly...

This paper analyses European Union FDI flows into the CEECs at a sector level, which is currently the less studied aspect of this issue. The aim is to understand whether and to what extent FDI in different sectors reacts to the same characteristics of the host countries. The paper first presents...

The most dramatic recent immigration in Europe is the influx of more than 700,000 Albanians, about a quarter of the total Albanian workforce, in the 1990s. The vast majority migrated illegally. This paper analyses the determinants of Albanian migration based on a unique representative survey of...

In this paper, we test the neoclassical growth model and its main prediction of conditional convergence of productivity for a sample of transition countries over the period 1990-2002. We split the sample into three periods: 1990-1994, 1994-1998 and 1998-2002 and confirm the convergence...

China’s importance for India as a trading partner has increased tremendously over the recent years. At the same time, China has become the main target of Indian antidumping measures with a number of measures that is unprecedented worldwide. This paper provides a detailed analysis of trade...

The agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies. Many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational, while others have been gradual but persistent. This article reviews and synthesizes...

This paper investigates the relationship between the diffusion of EU standards and product quality upgrading using highly disaggregated import data to the EU in the food industry. Results show that, on average, the diffusion of EU voluntary standards boosts the rate of quality upgrading. However...

We analyse common stylized facts of services firms engaged in trade in a comparative study across four EU member countries. We find that, though relatively less engaged in trade than manufacturing firms, services firms have similar traits. Services firms are more likely to import than to export....

Melitz and Ottaviano’s (2008) firm-heterogeneity model predicts that trade liberalization induces a selection process from low to high productivity firms, which translates to an industry productivity growth. A similar firms’ selection effect is induced by market size. In this paper, these...