Innovations in information- and telecommunication technology render the proximity requirement between business partners obsolete and make business service outsourcing via cross-border trade more feasible. Although the (service-led) growth prospects have been widely discussed, evidence at the...

Economic globalization causes an increasing international fragmentation (disintegration) of value-added-chains, whereby firms outsource components of production to foreign markets. There is a high level of concern about unwelcome distributional effects. This paper provides a theoretical...

We work with a panel of bilateral trade flows from 1988 to 2002, exploring the influence of infrastructure, institutional quality, colonial and geographic context, and trade preferences on the pattern of bilateral trade. We are interested in threshold effects, and so emphasize those cases where...

I develop a generalized factor price frontier which incorporates endogenous adjustment of international fragmentation in multistage production, allowing for a continuum of stages. This allows us to address fragmentation, not only as an exogenous event, but also as an integral part of endogenous...

To understand the reasons for the formation of regional economic groupings two basic concepts are introduced: association and dissociation. Moreover, the importance of interest groups and strategic groups is discussed, and security and bargaining power as basic political motivations are...

Border regions and border effects currently attract a lot of attention in political practice and economic research. Substantial interest in regions located along the frontiers of integrating countries is predominantly inspired by the presumption that their specific geographic position might...

This paper examines the impacts of globalization on small countries, covering the main features of globalization, the quality of national economic and commercial environment, main characteristics of small countries including important facts and concrete indicators for their development, and...

Drawing on Transaction Costs Economics, this paper develops a new approach to conflict of law rules. It outlines a concept of constitutional uncertainty in international trade and presents a model of international transactions in the presence of a diversity of legal orders. We develop a general...

In the first era of financial globalization (1880-1914), global capital market integration led to substantial net capital movements from rich to poor economies. The historical experience stands in contrast to the contemporary globalization where gross capital mobility is equally high, but did...

The business literature suggests that exporters either use trade intermediaries or own foreign sales representations. Standard trade models are silent about this choice. We develop a model where producers differ with respect to competitive advantage and where trade intermediaries arise...