The European Union enforced respect of human rights and democratic principles an essential elements of all its preferential and non preferential trading agreements since the beginning of the 90's. In all EU external agreements, an essential element would imply that the EU can impose sanctions...

Who are the most prone to pay bribes? Who are angled for bribes? Who pay? This article explores these issues in sub-Saharan Africa, an area of the world where corruption is widespread. This paper empirical basis is a rich collection of comparable data provided by the Afrobarometer surveys...

The fact that crossing a political border dramatically reduces trade flows has been widely documented in the literature. The increasing number of borders has surprisingly attracted much less attention. The number of independent countries has indeed risen from 72 in 1948 to 192 today. This paper...

Using a gravity model of trade, this paper examines the consequences on inter- national trade of the quality and the similarity of domestic institutions. We find an asymme- tric impact on trade of institutions quality. Our estimations show that a country exports all the more since the quality of...

Competition is often presented as a good way to fight against corruption. However, no theoretical or empirical study allows us to conclude that an increase in competition reduces corruption. This article uses surveys of more than 10,000 firms in 80 countries to analyse the links between...

Do good institutions foster trade? Many trade agreements, and notably those of the European Union, introduce institutional provisions in addition to strictly free-trade measures. In this article, we are interested in the influence of democracy and the fight against corruption on trade. We use a...

This paper analyzes the impact of corruption on the extent of trust in political institutions using a rich collection of comparable data provided by the Afrobarometer surveys conducted in 18 sub-Saharan African countries. More specifically, we set out to test the “efficient grease”...