We use a 3-step analysis to assess the sustainability of public finances in the EU27. Firstly, we perform the SURADF specific panel unit root test to investigate the meanreverting behaviour of general government expenditure and revenue ratios. Secondly, we apply the bootstrap panel cointegration...

The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries...

The main goal of regionalization is the creation of free trade areas and the guarantee for countries to accede to a widened market. Many studies dealing with the effects of regional free trade agreements on trade flows already exist in the economic literature and the explosion in the number of...

We assess the sustainability of public finances in the EU15 over the period 1970-2006 using stationarity and cointegration analysis. Specifically, we use panel unit root tests of the first and second generation allowing in some cases for structural breaks. We also apply modern panel...

This paper investigates whether exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) into import prices is a nonlinear phenomenon for five heavily indebted Euro area countries, namely the so-called GIIPS group (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain). Using logistic smooth transition models, we explore the...

This paper analyses the trade balance effects of Europe agreements (EA) between the EU-15 and four new EU members from Central and Eastern Europe (CEEC-4) using both static and dynamic panel data approaches. Specifically, the system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM, Blundell and Bond, 1998)...

We assess the cointegration relationship between current account and budget balances, and effective real exchange rates, using recent bootstrap panel cointegration techniques and SUR methods. We investigate the magnitude of the relationship between the two imbalances for each country for the...

In this paper, we evaluate the first-stage pass-through, namely the responsiveness of import prices to the exchange rate changes, for a sample of euro area (EA) countries. Our study aims to shed further light on the role of microeconomic factors vs. macroeconomic factors in influencing the...

This paper investigates the existence of an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) and its robustness for 28 countries of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) over the recent period. Our methodology relies on four recent estimation methods for non-stationary panel data and includes four pollutants...

According to the pollution haven hypotheses differences in environmental regulation affect trade flows and plant location. Specifically, environmental stringency should decrease exports and increase imports of "dirty" goods. This paper estimates a gravity model to establish whether the...