In this paper I analyze the productivity gains from trade liberalization in the Belgian textile industry. So far, empirical research has established a strong relationship between opening up to trade and productivity, relying almost entirely on deflated sales to proxy for output in the production...

We evaluate the impact of international competition on firm-level perfor- mance in Belgium. In the manufacturing sector we consider both the impact of global competition through measures of import penetration and the impact of within-EU competitiveness using measures of relative labor cost. In...

We separately observe variable input expenditure and expenditure on fixed inputs in novel firm-level data covering the Belgian manufacturing sector over the last decades. This permits a deeper investigation of two potential drivers of the globally observed widening gap between firms' revenue and...

In this paper I analyze the productivity gains from trade liberalization in the Belgian textile industry. So far, empirical research has established a strong relationship between opening up to trade and productivity, relying almost entirely on deflated sales to proxy for output in the production...

The process of the East-West integration has come to a point that enlargement appears inevitable. But are these countries really ready to join the EU in tfirms of competitive perfirmance? Firstly, we construct a virtual best practice production frontier for firms active in a European Union...