Depuis les années 1990, on assiste à une prolifération d'accords commerciaux bilatéraux. Nombre d’entre eux se préoccupent de thèmes non directement commerciaux comme les institutions politiques, le développement soutenable, les normes de travail ou la politique de la concurrence....

Since the 1990s, we have seen a proliferation of bilateral trade agreements. Many of these have encompassed topics that are not directly linked to trade, such as political institutions, sustainable development, labour standards or competition policy. The European Union itself is caught up in...

This paper presents a dynamic two sector, two skill groups model of endogenous skill and sector specific technological change. The sectors refer to a high-tech” and a low-tech” sector of an economy. The direction of technological change is driven by market forces determined by the skill...

Using the IAB Employment Sample (IABS) covering 1980-2001 we investigate what impact the fall of the Iron Curtain has had on the skill structure of employment and wages in the western German districts neighbouring the Czech Republic. The introduction of free trade in this region, which has one...

We introduce search and matching unemployment into a model of trade with differentiated goods and heterogeneous firms. Countries may differ with respect to size, geographical location, and labor market institutions. Contrary to the literature, our single-sector perspective pays special attention...

During the last two decades, the labour demand structure in Germany has experienced a decrease in the demand for the low skilled. Possible explanations for this trend are investigated in this study for West Germany (1994- 1997) using a unique linked employer-employee panel data set for Germany....

Hardly noticed in Western Europe the fall of the Iron Curtain had also ef-fects on the regional structures of the labour markets in the Central and Eastern Euro-pean Countries (CEEC). I analyse whether during the undoubtedly increasing integration of markets the Czech border region close to the...

The nature of international trade has changed significantly. For centuries, trade concentrated on the exchange of finished goods. It now increasingly involves bits of value that are added at different locations to combine into one final product. Therefore, trade in functions or tasks are of...

We analyse a world consisting of 'the North' and 'the South' where labour standards in the North are set by trade unions. Standards set by unions tend to increase output and welfare. There are no unions in the South and work standards are suboptimal. Trade between these two countries can imply a...

The current globalisation process is characterized by the emergence of global value chains. That is, production processes are becoming increasingly geographically fragmented. Not only are final goods traded internationally, but in particular, trade in intermediate goods and services has...