This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

The European Commission has set a target date of 2025 for Western Balkan EU accession, while also outlining a broader new strategy which includes Brussels taking a more active role in solving political disputes in the region, and upgrading infrastructure as part of the Berlin Process. We welcome...

This report investigates the impact of trade structure and trade specialization on long-run development patterns in a heterogeneous set of countries, including most OECD countries, developing and rapidly industrializing Asian and Latin American countries as well as ten Central and Eastern...

The patterns of Central and East European countries' (CEECs) development in the course of transition and following EU accession have been determined by these countries' generally uncritical adoption of policies consistent first with the commandments of the Washington Consensus and then with the...

This article aims to investigate the patterns of flows in data around the world. It does so by starting from the proposition that data are used as inputs into the production of services and goods in the economy. Using new BEA input output tables in which data usage has a specific mention, this...

Global trade has been exceptionally weak over the past four years. While global trade grew at approximately twice the rate of GDP prior to the Great Recession, the ratio of global trade to GDP growth has declined to about unity since 2012. This paper assesses to what extent the change in the...