Recognition of the competitiveness of various export commodities is important in the design of industrial policies which shapes a country's structural transformation. The commonly used approach is the Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) which was introduced by Balassa in 1965. Over the years,...

This paper uses bilateral data on 420 merchandise trade flows between 21 industrial countries are used to estimate standard trade equations. The data set of over 11,000 observations allows the underlying elasticities to be estimated with considerable precision. Remarkably, a single specification...

Migration from Africa and the Middle East to the EU has intensified over the last two decades. Relative differences between developed EU and less developed African and Middle East countries have not declined that much and continue to drive mobility. Also, demographic trends show a strong...

Governments across the globe are progressively becoming aware of the increasing significance of international migration and remittances on the international development agenda. Remittances are perceived as one of the key benefits that migration bring to originating countries. Zimbabweans abroad...

All over Europe, ageing populations threaten nations' financial sustainability. In this paper we examine the potential of immigration to strengthen financial sustainability. We look at a particularly challenging case, namely that of Denmark, which has extensive tax-financed welfare programmes...

In this paper we study international linkages when forecasting unemployment rates in a sample of 24 OECD economies. We propose a Global Unemployment Factor (GUF) and test its predictive ability considering in-sample and out-of-sample exercises. Our main results indicate that the predictive...

Population size and structure in conjunction with the participation behavior are the determinants of labor supply. Thereby, among the demographic components, migration is the one shaping both the size and the structure of a population the strongest in the short to medium term while...

This paper demonstrates that citizens in seven advanced industrialized democracies generally oppose more open immigration policies, but stand ready to admit individual immigrants. Using an experimental design, we demonstrate the applicability of the “person-positivity bias” to immigration...