East Asia has rapidly become the third centre of gravity for global economic activity. North America is relatively well integrated with East Asia, but Europe is not. This paper explores the extent to which economic growth and trade policy developments over the next decade or so will strengthen...

The European Union is the world's largest trader, a fact that on the face of it ought to convert into considerable clout in international commercial negotiations. Yet, since the World Trade Organization's (WTO's) creation in 1995, it is difficult to point to a string of successes for the...

This paper makes a tentative forecast of the impact on Spanish trade of the liberalization of economic transactions between the EU and the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEECs), as envisaged in the Association Agreements aimed at the eventual enlargement of the EU to...

Given the sluggish progress in multilateral trade negotiations Southern and Eastern African negotiators are likely to focus their attention on the negotiations of Economic Partnership Agreements with the European Union. This paper analyses possible advantages and disadvantages for ACP countries...

This Paper contributes ideas and analysis to the ongoing EU reform debate. It consists of three distinct parts: voting in the Council of Ministers, restructuring the ECB's Governing Council, and the setting of enlargement “examination” dates. The IGC currently focuses on Council voting,...

We identify in this Paper the level of trade integration between the three largest economic powers of the world, often called the Triad: The United States, the EU and Japan. We focus on measuring possible asymmetries in market access between members of the Triad using border effects between each...

We investigate the hypothesis that firms prefer to locate ``where the markets are." We use a theoretical model of location choice under imperfect competition to formalise this concept. The model yields an equilibrium profit equation incorporating a term closely connected to the market potential...

In recent years the bipolar multilateral trading system of the post-war years has given way to a multipolar alternative. Although many specifics have yet to be determined, some contours of this new trade policy landscape are coming into focus and in this short essay I examine their implications...

This paper analyses the effects of regional integration on the location of increasing-returns industry and the resulting pattern of trade. Theoretically, it is shown that regional integration may initially lead to a dispersion of industry inside the customs union. Below a certain threshold of...

This paper presents new estimates of the economic benefits from economic and political integration. Using the synthetic counterfactuals method, we estimate how GDP per capita and labour productivity would have behaved for the countries that joined the European Union (EU) in the 1973, 1980s, 1995...