This paper studies whether trade integration between the EU15 and Central Europe has led to more export specialization in Central Europe. Moreover, we analyze the impact of institutional reforms in Central Europe on export specialization. The empirical analysis is set up for thirteen Central...

In international trade literature, there is a common feature that the abolishment of barriers to trade leads to the expansion of trade flows. Most of the empirical studies aiming at simulation of welfare effects of trade liberalization explicitly make use of this direct tariff reduction - trade...

This study uses a new, innovative measure of trade protection and finds that less trade protection is associated with higher income per capita, using data from 131 developed and developing countries.

This paper presents an ex-post empirical analysis of the impact of European electricity mar- ket reforms on markups of rms. The working hypothesis is that further economic integration would bring competition into electricity markets re ected by lower markups of electricity rms. The results show...

This paper investigates whether European electricity market reforms have induced any changes in rm eciency either through productive, allocative or dynamic eciency improve- ments. In particular, this ex-post analysis looks closely at productivity e ects of changing industry structure, ownership...

Economists most often analyse the effects of protectionist or antidumping policies in the context of tariffs or voluntary export restraints - the latter are very similar to quotas in fact. Antidumping policies in the European Union however make frequent use of price undertakings. Whereas the...

In this paper we examine the reasons behind the remarkable export performance of transition economies in the last two decades. Following Redding and Venables (2004, 2004a) and Fugazza (2004), we decompose export performance into the gains due to the advantageous access to foreign markets and...

This paper uses a novel dataset on US food import refusals to show that reputation is an important factor in the enforcement of sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) measures. The strongest reputation effect comes from a country’s own history of compliance in relation to a particular product. The...

Building on the empirical evidence resulting from a newly developed database of foreign direct investment (FDI) operations in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEECs), panel data techniques are used to show that, at the sector level, a consistent modelling of FDI flows needs to take...

In this paper we study how European integration would affect the industry location and sectoral specialisation of local economies in the CEE accession countries. The theoretical framework of our study is based on the new eco- nomic geography, which allows us to predict not only the...