Replaced with revised version of paper 06/08/2010.

Reciprocal trade agreements (RTAs), which grant special preferences to members, affect the pattern and volume of bilateral trade in global markets. This study uses the gravity framework and panel data depicting annual trade between 69 countries over 31 years to examine how 11 RTAs have shaped...

The paper is inviting a reader to think to what extent we can use the knowledge resulting from laws of nature for exploring economic processes. In order to look for the answers on this question, the paper is going to explore international trade flows between the Baltic Sea region countries using...

Since 1995, a liberalization process - the so- called Barcelona Process - has begun in the Mediterranean area. It aims at establishing a free trade area for 2010 in the Mediterranean Basin. For the moment the full liberalization concerns industrial product s trade whereas agriculture remains...

This paper identifies and analyzes the effects of existing trade networks on bilateral trade volumes in the Western Hemisphere by applying the gravity model of international trade to two data-sets, one encompassing bilateral trade volumes of agricultural products and one encompassing bilateral...

The paper explores regional trade integration of the countries involved in the EU eastward enlargement (EU-25) processes distinguishing the possible regional trade clusters within EU-25 that may support integration of the EU-15 and the new member states. We examine whether the gravity equation...

The paper aims to explore international trade flows of the countries involved in the EU eastward enlargement processes - the current EU members (EU15) and the candidate countries (CC12). The empirical results of the study allow us to conclude that the behaviour of bilateral trade flows within...

Gravity models were developed to estimate the potential bilateral exports of cocoa under trade liberalization by the sixteen major cocoa producing countries to the US using panel data from 1989 to 2003. The results indicate that differences between resource endowment, relative size of economies,...

The rapid increase in the number of bilateral and regional free-trade agreements since 1995 is a striking development. The proliferation of these agreements has raised questions about whether they have, in fact, opened markets, created trade, promoted economic growth, and/or distorted trade....