The Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (HS) is the most successful legally binding instrument of the World Customs Organization (WCO) with 156 contracting parties. More and more countries and economic regions are applying the HS nomenclature worldwide. But not all member states...

This paper provides the first quantitative evidence on the restrictiveness of services policies in 2016 for a sample of developing countries, based on recently released regulatory data collected by the World Bank and WTO. We use machine learning to recreate to a high degree of accuracy the...

Economic theory has recently begun to consider the economic impact of narratives. Narrative economics can also be extended to the analysis of the economic-political effect of narratives in the context of the European core-periphery divide, which intensified after the European sovereign-debt...

The analysis of business cycle synchronization levels has become a key point in the discussion of the processes of international economic integration. Economists show a particular interest in analyzing the frequency of processes of business cycle convergence and divergence (decoupling) in the...

The paper evaluates the impact of the EU Eastern enlargement 2004 on the economic performance of border regions located at the frontier to the new member states in the East. These regions were assumed to be particularly affected by the enlargement because of their geographic proximity to the new...

The Middle East was once seen as a medieval great globalized force. Nowadays it shows one of the lowest intra-regional trade in the world and therefore it is claimed that the region is poorly integrated. Yet, with the steady flow of workers across national borders of the Middle East is this...

The Middle East was once seen as a medieval great globalized force. Nowadays it shows one of the lowest intra-regional trade in the world and therefore it is claimed that the region is poorly integrated. Yet, with the steady .ow of workers across national borders of the Middle East is this...

This paper analyses the smoothing of asymmetric shocks to output for a sample of OECD countries. It also examines whether the private capital markets will be able to replace the government in providing output smoothing in the euro-area, in the near future. The research finds no evidence of large...

This paper studies the degree of integration of China's domestic market and investigates the determinants of inter-provincial trade barriers under the rubric endogenoustrade policy theory. I rely on industry-level trade flows extracted from provincial input-output tables to develop a model that...

The paper argues that economic integration causes problems for the labor market of high-wage countries due to cross-border labor mobility and the accompanying increase in labor supply. Empirical evidence is provided from an analysis of regional labor market effects of German re-unification. In...