Despite the EU emphasis on the 1995 Barcelona process, trade integration with the Mediterranean (MED) countries is still underdeveloped. To contrast the success of EU integration with MED countries and that with the new EU members, we compute the trade potential of these EU partners from 1995 to...

This paper attempts to forecast the EU-Romania trade using the gravity approach developed in Ferragina, Giovannetti and Pastore (2005). The trade potential of Romania with five EU members (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and UK) is computed using an “out-of-sample” methodology for the period...

The main purpose of this paper is to assess intra-regional trade within the CIS by looking at the impact of numerous trade agreements in the region. Applying a gravity model on a set of 162 countries, we attempt to assess dynamics of intra-regional trade of various trade agreements between 1995...

This paper analyses the impact of disintegration of an economic union on trade patterns. Our study focuses on South-eastern Europe, which was highly fragmented during the nineties because of the dissolution of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) and of the Socialist Federal Republic...

This paper aims to evaluate the trade potential of manufactured products between the members of the EU25 in the threshold of its Eastern enlargement. We estimate, for 2002, a cross-section gravity model, whose coefficients will be used to project the “natural” trade relations between them....

This paper aims to evaluate the trade potential of manufactured products between countries belonging to the EU in the threshold of its Eastern enlargement. For this purpose we use a Gravity model which is estimated with a Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood Method. We extend the specification of...

In this paper we examine the impact of membership in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) on trade between PTA members. Rather than considering the impact of PTA membership on the volume of trade we consider the impact of membership on the structure of trade. For a large sample of countries over...

This paper explores two questions. First, can Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) affect industrial development in developing countries? Second, does it matter for developing countries whom they sign the PTAs with? We find that the answer to both questions is yes. Using bilateral manufactured...

This paper examines the ‘small share’ problem inherent within the constant elasticity of substitution Armington specification. As a de facto research tool in the quantitative trade literature, this structural bias plagues the results of numerous multi-region CGE studies. Kuiper and van...

This paper investigates the potential for a further increase in trade between the fifteen old EU members and the twelve new countries having joined in 2004 and 2007 that results from a convergence of the new members' institutions towards the level of the EU-15 in accordance with the Acquis...