All countries would agree to immediate global free trade if countries were compensated for any terms-of-trade losses with transfers from countries whose terms-of-trade improve, and if customs unions were required to have no effects on non-member countries. Global free trade with transfers is in...

This paper examines the home country bias in the goods market among OECD countries. An average country imports about two and a half times as much from itself as from an otherwise identical foreign country, after controlling for sizes of exporter and importer, their direct distance, geographic...

Recent research in international economic history has opened up new lines of enquiry on the origins of globalization, as well as its causes and consequences. Such findings have the potential to inform contemporary debates and this paper considers what lessons this body of historical work has for...

It is rarely questioned that the European Union can be considered a model for other world regions. Comparable initiatives elsewhere are much less integrated, and up until now less successful, even if like Mercosur they are based on the European model. Although elements of the democratic rule of...

The unprecedented drop in international trade during the last quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 has mostly been analysed at the macroeconomic or sectoral level. However, heterogeneous exporters in terms of productivity, size or external finance dependence should be hit differently by...

Over the past two decades, globalisation has given a boost to world trade, has grown one and a half times faster than world output, and the difference has even been considerably higher in recent years as world trade growth accelerated very strongly. More

The paper deals with the foreign trade performance of the new member countries in their first five years of membership (and, with two years for Bulgaria and Romania). The first part of the statistical survey focuses on trade developments supporting and/or defying some key issues of trade theory....

The Lisbon Strategy is working; it has helped to bring about higher economic growth, more jobs and reduced unemployment. As a new member state of the European Union, Romania should respond positively to the challenges of the Lisbon Strategy, and build the prerequisites for a knowledge-based...

This paper presents a critical survey of the literature on trade openness. In the first part we start by analyzing distributive domestic issues that arise following changing trade patterns. We identify the sources of the problems, and assess the technical and political feasibility of measures...

This paper reviews the most significant recent developments in the theory of trade agreements. The paper offers an integrated approach to evaluating trade agreements, and uses the approach to present results on preferential and multilateral trade agreements. The paper identifies also several...