Trade costs associated with institutional failures and political risks, continue to serve as a big barrier to regional and international trade. Despite this strong impediment, limited work has been done to investigate the effect of weak institutions and type of political regime on bilateral...

Local protectionism disrupts buyer-supplier chains, since it requests local firms to buy the outputs of other local firms as inputs. Hence, it is an important factor for firms' location choices, as buyer-supplier chains affect profitability. I study how local protectionism shapes the spatial...

While global trade talks have been making very little progress in recent years, the number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) has grown rapidly, and many of these institutions are reaching much deeper into the domestic political arena than traditional multilateral trade liberalization....

The 'Beyond GDP' approach considers GDP (Gross Domestic Product) insufficient to capture the multidimensional nature of progress and promotes the use of alternative indicators in policy. Although commonly used as an indicator of well-being, GDP is a measure of economic performance, reflecting...

We explore the economic implications of the possible accession of Croatia to the European Union. We focus on two main changes associated with the EU-membership: accession to the internal European Market and institutional reforms in Croatia triggered by the EU-membership. consumption per capita...

This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges for Southern and Eastern African ACP countries of services negotiations in the context of European Partnership Agreements. The paper provides an overview of existing flows in services from and to Southern and Eastern Africa, an overview that...

This paper argues that different types of trade liberalization { multilateral versus regional { may lead to different R&D and productivity levels of firms. Trade agreements between countries are modelled with a network: nodes represent countries and a link between the nodes indicates the...

The well-known question whether regional trade agreements (RTAs) and the multilateral trading system (MTS) are "strangers, friends, or foes" (Bhagwati and Panagariya, 1996) has gained new importance with the widespread proliferation of RTAs in recent years. Based on an extensive data set which...

In this paper, we analyzed key aspects of the changing economic relationship between the European Union (EU) and Asia, and explored the potential economic ramifications of deeper EU-Asian economic cooperation. We also investigated the possible costs to the EU of remaining "disengaged" from the...