The European Union and Japan have recently launched negotiations about a bilateral free trade agreement as means of economic stimulation, with trade as a driving force to create growth and wealth. Since customs duties are already low, the success of the liberalization process hinges on the...

The first objective of this paper is to present theoretical approaches to the impact of trade growth (induced by monetary integration) on business cycle synchronization which is an important factor of a country's readiness for a currency union accession. The main conclusion from the first part...

The paper studies the impact of migration policy liberalisation on international labour migration in the enlarged EU in a structural NEG approach. The liberalisation of migration policy would induce additional 1.80 - 2.98 percent of the total EU workforce to change their country of location,...

During the last decades, international trade flows especially of the industrialized countries allegedly became more and more intra-industry. At the same time, employment perspectives particularly of the low-skilled by tendency deteriorated in these countries. This phenomenon is often traced back...

The new trade theory explains several features of the current development of EU's trade with CEECs better than the Heckscher-Ohlin model. In 1997, CEECs participated in the European economy with levels of intraindustry trade comparable to peripheral EU countries. However, this induced increased...

The European Union and Japan have recently launched negotiations about a bilateral free trade agreement as means of economic stimulation, with trade as a driving force to create growth and wealth. Since customs duties are already low, the success of the liberalization process hinges on the...

We present an analysis of the intra-industry nature of agri-food trade between Hungary and the European Union, following the Association Agreement signed in 1991. A slight growth in intra-industry trade (IIT) is indicated by the Grubel-Lloyd index. However, it is not uniform by product group or...

In models with heterogeneous firms trade integration has a positive impact on aggregate productivity through the selection of the best firms as import competition drives the least productive ones out of the market. To quantify the impact of firm selection on productivity, we calibrate and...

We analyse the impact of relaxing rules of origin (ROOs) in a simple setting with heterogeneous firms that buy intermediate inputs from domestic and foreign sources. In particular, we consider the impact of switching from bilateral to diagonal cumulation when using preferences (instead of paying...

The SSM is a proposal from the G-33 Group in the Doha Round negotiations in which developing countries would be allowed to use contingent tariffs to control import surges of food commodities and/or downward spikes in their border prices. The principal objective is to safeguard the livelihood...