The policy debate in recent years has increasingly focused on issues concerning size distribution of firms and employment. It is often claimed that we are approaching a new economic era where large enterprises have lost their importance in developed economies. This raises the question of what we...

Developing countries, in particular the least developed ones, probably have more to learn from social policies in Europe during the early 20th century than from the elaborate welfare-state arrangements after World War II. In addition to macro­economic growth and stability, the main ambitions...

We consider policy issues regarding parallel imports (PIs) of brand-name pharmaceuticals in the European Union, where such trade is permitted. We develop a simple model in which an original manufacturer competes in its home market with PI firms. The model suggests that for small trade costs the...

Intellectual property rights and competition policy are intimately related. In this paper I survey the economic literature analyzing the interaction between intellectual property law and competition law and how the boundary between these two policies is drawn in practice. Recognizing that...

We analyze producer price developments in the transition from a national exchange rate regime to a monetary union. The focus is on the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Stylized facts witness about an exploding gaps in producer-price inflation during the years immediately following the...

The current political turmoil in the Arab world has contributed to renewed interest in the Barcelona Process. This paper explores whether deeper integration in the form of trade facilitation - i.e. improved and simplified trade procedures - could be an important part of a reform agenda. Adopting...

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, against the background of an existing empirical literature on the duration of trade which has found that international trade is often of strikingly short duration, we aim to establish whether or not EU imports from the rest of the world also are...

Aiming to explore how the survival of trade flows has evolved over time, we analyze a rich data set of detailed imports to individual EU15 countries from 140 non-EU exporters, covering the period 1962-2006. We find that short duration is a persistent characteristic of trade throughout the...

A main component of customs unions is a common trade policy on imports from non-member countries. Trade policy covers both tariff and non-tariff barriers like trade procedures. We argue that since trade procedures vary markedly across EU countries, the EU is not, strictly speaking, a customs...

The literature on trade facilitation has mostly focused on implications for trade volumes. However, recent theoretical contributions have emphasized that trade costs - such as transaction costs related to cross-border trade procedures - affect both the traded volumes of "old" goods (the...