Targeted advertising can benefit consumers through lower prices for access to websites, Yet, if consumers dislike that websites collect their personal information, their welfare may go down. We study competition for consumers between websites that can show targeted advertisements. We find that...

This study employs a structural gravity approach to analyse the impact of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on bilateral FDI. We use the UNCTAD global database on bilateral FDI stocks and flows. To control for the heterogeneous nature of PTAs we employ three different indicators of PTA depth....

Europe’s market for services is fragmented by many regulatory barriers. The Services directive proposed by the European Commission aims to integrate national services markets by reducing these barriers. Several studies indicate that bilateral trade and foreign direct investment in services...

The paper investigates whether the self-selection hypothesis and other predictions from the heterogeneous-firms trade models can explain the export participation patterns for Dutch firms in manufacturing and services. The results provide strong support for the self-selection hypothesis,...

A pervasive trend that characterised the past two decades of European economic growth is that the share in the economy of commercial services, and particularly business services, grows monotonically, and this mainly to the expense of the manufacturing sector. The structural shift reflects a...

This report summarises the findings of a study on the growth factors and growth prospects of the business services (BS)industry, applying an internationally comparative perspective. The report untangles factors behind the extraordinary growth of the BS industry during last decade,comparing it...

This report identifies the factors behind structural growth of the business services industry, applying growth decomposition and qualitative analysis.

The European Union import policy for bananas grants preferential trade access for ACP bananas and discriminates against bananas from other sources. It is shown that such trade discrimination cannot be defended by development-related motives. As a form of aid transfer to banana-exporting ACP...

In most OECD countries, the business services industry has grown much faster than the market sector as a whole. The industry in most cases, however, has displayed stagnating productivity growth, in some periods even a fall in productivity. Does this fast-growing industry with a bad productivity...

In international forums the EU calls for freedom of movement for goods, services and capital. Freedom of movement of labour - labour migration in other words - is excluded from this claim, certainly in relation to medium- and low-skilled labour. This paper addresses two questions. Firstly, what...