The Eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU) is likely to give a further boost to trade and capital flows, yet empirical evidence on the possible magnitudes is still scarce. This paper uses four different datasets to estimate the determinants of international asset holdings and trade...

The EU has recently entered accession talks with five transition economies of eastern Europe. Membership in the EU would require inter alia the full liberalization of capital flows. This paper provides empirical evidence on the openness towards foreign capital that the accession states have...

The process of European integration has gained considerable momentum during the past couple of years. This paper provides an assessment of the degree of integration of both the accession states of central and eastern Europe and of the pre-ins for monetary union with respect to Germany. Using...

A small expectations-expanded "Mundell-Fleming" model is built for the European Union Accession Countries and estimated to assess the optimality of different exchange rate regimes (a peg and a float) through a simple welfare function. Floating appears as the best option for most of the countries...

The analysis of Baltic regional trade patterns reveals that during the nineties the Baltic states made significant progress to integrate into the Western European division of labour although a significant share of (transit) trade with Russia remained. In view of this development, history seems...

This paper investigates social mobility in Bolivia and discusses its implications for poverty reduction and long-run growth. Regressions based on household survey data show that social mobility is very low in Bolivia, even by Latin American standards. This is mainly caused by an inadequate...

Political proximity between donor and recipient governments may impair the effectiveness of aid by encouraging favoritism. By contrast, political misalignment between donor and recipient governments may render aid less effective by adding to transaction costs and giving rise to incentive...

Some recent empirical studies deny any direct performance effects of measures of geography and conclude that institutions trump all other potential determinants of development. For given effects of institutional quality, our empirical results indicate quantitatively important direct negative...

This paper investigates the relationship between the size of government and economic growth in OECD countries in 1960?2000. The underlying idea is that government expenditures on public goods basically have a positive effect on growth, but this growth effect tends to decline or even reverse when...

The paper elaborates on the employment intensity of growth. Previous evidence regarding this question is surveyed. Empirical results concerning Europe and selected other industrial countries reveal that the cyclical link between unemployment and growth is still stable in the nineties. However,...