From a pure welfare economic viewpoint, there is no contradiction between a deepening and a widening of the EU. However, the analysis in this paper shows that the factual degree of deepening efforts within the EU by far exceeds the economically optimal one. Above all, the tendency of the...

The EAC is on the verge of establishing a customs union. But this is accompanied by fears that the Customs Union would lead to trade imbalances among the Partner States, which would create serious problems for the proper functioning of the Customs Union itself. To mitigate these problems the...

In Africa there has been an immense effort in the past, continuing into the present, to unite politically and to build numerous economic integration areas. In this paper we discuss the reasons for the existence of this phenomenon in Africa which we call the drive to political and economic...

Drawing on recent work on the creation and breakup of countries, this paper examines the impact of economic and political integration on the vertical government structure. It argues that by increasing the market size and the benefits from the decentralized provision of public goods, integration...

Risks that are associated with an uncertain trading world have been dealt with using two different techniques in the literature: defensive, or insurance approaches, and preventive, or self-protection approaches. Much of the earlier work was emphasized by security issues but with the end of the...

While the regional economic integration encompassing the former Soviet Union (FSU) transpires to be inefficient, there appears to be a stronger interest in regionalism in smaller groups of more homogenous and geographically connected countries of the region, specifically, Central Asia. Using a...

The paper examines policy externalities between imperfectly competitive open economies where unemployment prevails in general equilibrium. We develop a two-country and two-sector model with monopolistic competition in the goods market and wage bargaining in the labor market. Policy externalities...

This paper introduces the Small World model (Watts and Strogatz, Nature, 1998) into the theory of economic growth and investigates how increasing economic integration affects firm size and efficiency, norm enforcement, and aggregate economic performance. When economic integration is low and...

This paper examines an economic union where oligopolistic firms produce by skilled and unskilled labor and do in-house R&D by skilled labor. The planner of the union accepts new members to the union, regulates the labor market through a minimum wage for unskilled labor and supports firms by...