Since the 1960’s, the EU has offered trade preferences to developing countries in a complex set of systems. Broadly these systems can be divided into preferences for African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries, Mediterranean preferences and the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP). We...

Aiming to explore how the survival of trade flows has evolved over time, we analyze a rich data set of detailed imports to individual EU15 countries from 140 non-EU exporters, covering the period 1962-2006. We find that short duration is a persistent characteristic of trade throughout the...

The current political turmoil in the Arab world has contributed to renewed interest in the Barcelona Process and how it can be improved in order to promote inclusive growth in the non-EU Mediterranean countries. In this paper, we explore whether deeper integration in the form of trade...

Since at least the 1960s, the European Union (EU) has offered various kinds of non-reciprocal trade preferences for developing countries. Originally, these trade preferences had at least two policy goals: (i) to increase export volumes for developing countries and thereby boost their export...

The aim of this paper is to offer a comprehensive overview of non-reciprocal trade preferences. Legal and economic aspects are discussed, and in particular, focus is put on how the specific design of preference programs influence whether or not preferences will have their intended effects. The...

When analyzing panel data using regression models, it is often reasonable to allow for time-varying covariate effects. We propose a novel approach to modelling timevarying coefficients in panel data regressions, which is based on penalized regression techniques. To illustrate the usefulness of...

In endeavouring to explain the empirical puzzle that the sunk costs of exporting are important, but that, at the same time, trade flows do not, on average, survive for very long, this paper explores the concepts of core and peripheral markets. First, it illustrates that if the importance of sunk...

The recent literature on the duration of trade has predominantly analyzed the determinants of trade flow durations using Cox proportional hazards models. The purpose of this paper is to show why it is inappropriate to analyze the duration of trade with continuous-time models such as the Cox...

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, against the background of an existing empirical literature on the duration of trade which has found that international trade is often of strikingly short duration, we aim to establish whether or not EU imports from the rest of the world also are...

A main component of customs unions is a common trade policy on imports from non-member countries. Trade policy covers both tariff and non-tariff barriers like trade procedures. We argue that since trade procedures vary markedly across EU countries, the EU is not, strictly speaking, a customs...