(Report based on Background Study for European Competitiveness Report 2012, see http //ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/industrial-competitiveness/competitiveness-analysis/european-competitiveness-report/index_en.htm) Summary Countries belonging to the European neighbourhood are highly diverse....

Romania will become a member of the European Union in 2007 or 2008. This paper explores the potential impacts of this step on Austria in three major fields foreign trade, FDI and labour market. Romania is a more backward country than those which joined the EU in 2004, but it has been on a path...

This paper develops a Schumpeterian model of international specialization and catching-up. In a previous version of the model we looked at the impact on international trade specialization when different patterns of technological catching-up are followed. One of these is a Gerschenkron pattern at...

This is the text of Professor Robert Feenstra's 'Global Economy Lecture' which he delivered in February 2007. It is part of a lecture series organized jointly by the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw) and the Austrian National Bank (OeNB). In this lecture, Professor...

This paper adds to the small but growing literature that considers a relationship between the way a firm serves foreign markets and its subsequent performance. The current paper is the first to consider this issue for a sample of sub-Saharan African countries and includes data on both...

The report gives an overview of the overall trends in output and employment in Croatia, and of the country's fiscal and external sectors. It concentrates in more detail on the manufacturing sector and its competitiveness in comparison with developments in other Central, East and Southeast...

Romania has experienced a drawn-out transformation process and received relatively low amounts of foreign direct investment (FDI). But it has become competitive in labour-intensive manufacturing industries through the integration into European company networks by processing trade. The country...

This report gives an overview of patterns of structural change in Central and Eastern European economies over the decade 1989-1999. The analysis in this paper is restricted to a sub-sample of transition economies, namely the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEECs) - with the exception of...

This paper discusses the evolution of competitiveness, industrial and trade specialization of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEECs). It is shown that the paths taken by the different CEECs have been quite diverse and we attempt to show that a combination of a catching-up plus trade...

This paper attempts to reconcile the often inconclusive evidence on the impact of FDI on growth by taking into account the heterogeneity both among industries and among countries. Using a comparable database at the industry level for 35 countries of the OECD, Asia and Eastern Europe from 1987 to...