Recent events, historical evidence and geographical proximity suggest that the six EFTAns and twelve Central and East European countries (CEECs) are natural trading partners. This paper evaluates this suggestion by estimating the potential for EFTA-CEEC trade using the gravity model of Wang and...

This paper exploits exogenous features of the 1960s/70s container revolution to estimate the impact of the introduction of refrigerated containers (or reefers) on new trade of temperature sensitive products. Our identification strategy is justified by a historical narrative which suggests that...

This paper exploits exogenous features of the 1960s/70s container revolution to estimate the impact of the introduction of refrigerated containers (or reefers) on new trade of temperature sensitive products. Our identification strategy is justified by a historical narrative which suggests that...

Feedback mechanisms are the key to sequencing when it comes to regional integration. Feedback mechanisms can mean that today’s policy or institution alters the political economy landscape in a way that makes it politically optimal for future governments to take further steps towards...

A simple model of offshoring, which depicts offshoring as ‘shadow migration,’ permits straightforward derivation of necessary and sufficient conditions for the effects on wages, prices, production and trade. We show that offshoring requires modification of the four classic international...

In 1999, eleven European countries formed the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU); they abandoned their national currencies and adopted a new common currency, the euro. Several recent papers argue that the introduction of the euro has led (by itself) to a sizable and statistically significant...

Economic thinking on regionalism has traditionally focused on the Vinerian question: Would a nation gain from joining a trade bloc? Since 1991, "Big Think Regionalism" considers the broader question of regionalism’s impact on the world trading system focusing on two questions: Does spreading...

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of Turkey's membership on EU voting. The aspects that we discuss are decision-making efficiency and the distribution of power in the EU's leading decision making body the Council of Ministers. We compare two alternative Council voting rules: those accepted...

Trade is measured on a gross sales basis while GDP is measured on a net sales basis, i.e. value added. The rapid internationalisation of production in the last two decades has meant that gross trade flows are increasingly unrepresentative of value added flows. This fact has important...

This paper provides a selective survey of over half a century of research linking the neoclassical trade model to the data. Three lessons stand out. First, competitive and new trade theory models are complementary rather than competing ways to look at many existing empirical regularities....