Despite the EU emphasis on the 1995 Barcelona process, trade integration with the Mediterranean (MED) countries is still underdeveloped. To contrast the success of EU integration with MED countries and that with the new EU members, we compute the trade potential of these EU partners from 1995 to...

The 2009 European Report on Development analyses the costs and characteristics of fragility (Section 1), the capacity of fragile countries to cope with negative shocks such as the 2008-09 financial crisis (Section 2), and the EU’s current engagement with fragile countries as well as the...

This paper analyses the impact of trade liberalization on local labour markets in Ethiopia, with a focus on the gender dimension of employment. By exploiting rich micro-level data on Ethiopian workers, we evaluate the effect of the Ethiopian trade reforms on the changes and composition of...

Incorporating family decisions in a two-period-model of the world economy, we show that trade liberalization may reduce child labour in developing countries where the initial share of skilled workers in the adult workforce - though not as large as in developed countries - is nonetheless large...

Incorporating family decisions in a two-period.model of the world economy, we predict that trade liberalization raises the skill premium and reduces child labour in developing countries where the adult labour force is sufficiently well educated to attract production activities from abroad that...

This paper studies bilateral cultural preferences as an asymmetric dimension of cultural proximity and estimates their effect on greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI). We derive a gravity equation of FDI and test simultaneously the impact of both (a) the preferences of investing countries...