The onset of the financial crisis in 2008 has highlighted the problems of diverging external imbalances within Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the role of persistent losses in competitiveness. This paper starts by investigating some of the competitiveness factors which contributed to...

World trade contracted sharply in late 2008 and early 2009 following the deepening of the financial crisis in September 2008. This paper discusses the main mechanisms behind the global downturn in trade and its impact on euro area exports and competitiveness. It finds that the euro area was hit...

Ukraine's choice of European association and Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with the EU over membership in the Eurasian Customs Union (ECU) advocated by Russia has plunged the country into chaos and led to the most serious security crisis in Europe since the end of the Cold...

By studying the factors underlying differences in trade performance across European economies, this paper derives six different “trade models” for 22 EU-countries and explores their developmental and distributional dynamics. We first introduce a typology of trade models by clustering...

At the core of the formation of the European Union (EU) in 1993 was the economic goal to create a European Common Market to ensure freer trade and perhaps to create an egalitarian Europe. The post-1993 period saw the biggest enlargement of the EU to date from a meagre 3 member countries...

Globalisation can be a threat or an opportunity, depending on a country’s trade mix and its economic and regulatory structure. This paper assesses which EU countries are most exposed to globalisation using, among other indicators, measures of revealed comparative advantage. It then looks at...

In pre-industrial Europe, growth was driven by the expansion of trade, and the expansion of trade was driven by falling trading costs. This paper discusses the mechanisms linking these processes: profit-seeking behavior by merchants, changes in the organization of production, technological...

This paper investigates the link between overall specialization and growth, analyzing the shape of the relationship between the median of the sectoral distribution of the Balassa Index, our summary measure of overall specialization, and the level of per capita income. The median of the Balassa...

We quantify the relationships between deep trade liberalization and foreign direct investment (FDI). To this end, we focus on the effects of Deep Trade Agreements (DTAs), and we rely on a structural framework that simultaneously enables us to (i) estimate the direct impact of DTAs on FDI, (ii)...

This paper tests, in the context of the EU countries, the evidence presented by Hidalgo and Hausmann (2009) that economic complexity indicator is a good predictor of economic growth. Our results suggest that a group of countries in the EU with an economic complexity exceeding a certain threshold...