The European Union (EU) has long been accused of suffering from a “democratic deficit.” The European Parliament (EP), the only EU institution directly elected by citizens, is seen as having limited powers. Moreover, its members (MEPs) are often portrayed as unresponsive to the interests of...

This paper examines the relationship between offshoring activity by U.S. multinational firms and the structure of U.S trade preferences. We combine firm level panel data on U.S. foreign affiliate activity from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) with detailed measures of U.S. trade...

Das ifo Institut hat im Auftrag des Bundesministeriums für Wirtschaft und Technologie die vorliegende Evaluierungsstudie zu den Dimensionen und Auswirkungen eines Freihandelsabkommen zwischen der EU und den USA durchgeführt. Die Studie zeigt, dass ein tiefgreifendes...

In the 2000s, China's WTO entry constituted a major trade shock. In this paper, we analyze its eff ects on trade and value chains. The fragmentation of the global value chain makes it hard to disentangle who produces for whom. Value added trade contains this information. We build a multi-sector...

This article provides a review of literature on African Agency and the drivers of change within EU–African trade politics in negotiations on Economic Partnership Agreements between the European Union and African governments.

In this paper, we assess the value of Russia's preferential imports from all trade partners and CIS countries in particular. Total value of preferential imports in Russia (both duty free imports as well as imports subject to the discounted MFN duty under GSP) is equal to ca 12% (37.8 USD bln.)...

This paper extends the firm heterogeneity model of Melitz (2003) by introducing a new concept of endogenous investments in process R&D. The novelty is that if a firm invests more in R&D its expected innovation return hazard rate stochastically dominates the return of less R&D investments. Due to...

We examine the relationship between trade balance and net export with both, the official and real effective exchange rates on the J-Curve hypothesis and find evidence to support in favor of the hypothesis, coming from a panel data of 49 developing countries from Africa. Countries can improve...

How shifts in the economic leadership between countries can occur has been widely debated not only since the recent catch up of China in several sectors. However, there is no adequate theoretical model analyzing this question in the light of trade liberalization. This paper is the first one to...

What are the welfare and employment consequences of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) for developing and emerging countries? Standard quantitative models of international trade which are generally used to assess the impact of PTAs assume full employment and hence abstract from (net)...