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...

The paper tests the role of agglomeration effects on the export decision of services firms. Recent theories on trade with heterogeneous firms predict that export participation goes along with sunk market-entry costs. Only the more productive firms will be able to overcome these sunk costs. This...

Private and public concern about digital security, cybercrime and data privacy is growing the last few years. If Internet-related markets are flexible enough to cope with security concerns, given time, one would expect that - per unit of Internet traffic - the number and costs of cybersecurity...

The business services industry represents a large and fast-growing chunk of the Dutch economy, approaching the size of the total manufacturing industry. The industry, however, has displayed stagnating productivity growth, accompanied in some years by a fall in productivity. Do these stylised...

Using panel data for German and Dutch firms from the services sector, this paper analyses the importance of ICT capital deepening and innovation for productivity. We employ a model that takes into account that innovation and ICT use may be complementary. The results show that the contribution of...

This paper examines whether there are complementarities between investments in ICT, R&D and organizational innovation, and the effects of different investment profiles on total factor productivity growth on Dutch firm-level data. We estimate an integrated model of investment profile adoption and...