Analyzing the competitive performance of Romanian industry, one may say that Romania has an economy based mainly on the manufacturing industry, characterized by features such as: · high labor intensity, especially in industries such as textiles, knitwear, apparel, leather and footwear; · high...

Does trade improve institutions and contribute to long run growth? I develop a theory of trade, in which trade liberalization provides incentive to change institutions in two ways. On the one hand, trade leads to specialization according to comparative advantage, expanding the industries that do...

The unprecedented economic rise of Eastern Europe and China in the last two decades has triggered concerns in developed Western market economies about adverse effects for domestic labor markets trough increased import competition. Simultaneously, exports from developed countries to these new...

This paper claims that distance alone is a poor proxy for international transport costs in gravity equations. We develop a theoretical framework with a manufacturing and a transport sector, where the level of manufacturing exports determines the demand for transport. Above a certain threshold,...

The Gravity Model is the workhorse for empirical studies in International Economies and it is commonly used in explaining the trade flow between countries. Recently, several studies have showed the importance of taking into account the spatial effect. Spatial Econometric techniques meet this...

The aim of the present paper is to describe the investment environment in Romania, to highlight the stringent problems that need to be solved and also to propose solutions for a better investment environment. In the actual economic context, policymakers across all regions are facing difficult...