What determines a country's ability to compete in international markets? What fosters the global competitiveness of its firms? And in the European context, have key elements of the EU strategy such as EMU and enlargement helped or hindered domestic firms' competitiveness in local and global...

This paper analyses the relationship between openness to trade and wages at the industry level (15 manufacturing industries) in 25 EU countries over the period from 1995 to 2005. By applying a cross-country and industry-specific approach, it is possible to control for unobserved heterogeneity at...

In this paper we look at business cycles similarities between CEE countries and the euro area. Particularly, we uncover GDP-inflation cycles by adopting a trend-cycle decomposition model which allows the trend to be either stochastic or deterministic i.e. of the non-linear type. Once cyclical...

In this paper, we highlight the role of global value chains in the synchronization of economic activity between countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the euro area. We start off by demonstrating that the degree of synchronization of the business cycles of CEE countries and their main...

The EMU accession countries are obliged to fulfill the Maastricht convergence criteria prior to entering the EMU. This paper uses a DSGE model of a two-sector small open economy, to address the following question: how do the Maastricht convergence criteria modify optimal monetary policy in an...

This paper analyses the rapid trade integration of the Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC's) with the euro area in the past ten years and draws implications for further integration. We use as benchmark an enhanced gravity model estimated for a large sample of bilateral trade flows...

This paper provides estimates of the exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) to consumer prices for nine central and eastern European EU Member States. Using a five-variate cointegrated VAR (vector autoregression) for each country and impulse responses derived from the VECM (vector error correction...

This paper presents empirical evidence of the effect of FDI inflows on productivity convergence in central and eastern Europe, using industry-level data. Four conclusions stand out. First, there is a strong convergence effect in productivity, both at the country and at the industry level....

We investigate the impact of China as a global competitor on the trade performance of the ten Central, Eastern and Southeastern European EU Member States (CESEE-10) in the EU-15 market. The paper takes a comprehensive approach as we analyze export growth, export market shares, extensive and...

This paper analyzes the relation between exchange rate volatility and several macroeconomic variables, namely real per capita output growth, the credit cycle, the stock of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) and the current account balance, in the Central and Eastern European EU Member...