Promising growth rates, increased trade, and competition among major global players for African resources have boosted the development and bargaining power of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in relation to the EU. However, Africa's least developed countries remain vulnerable to external shocks....

Rules of Origin (RoO) are essential components of any preferential trade agreement (PTA) short of a full customs union. The recent proliferation of PTAs has led to increased interest in the effects of RoO with empirical estimates consistently showing that they act as barriers to intra-PTA trade....

Recent theoretical work suggests that the presence of foreign direct investment (FDI) lowers a country's noncooperative Nash tariff. To test this hypothesis, we first adapt the theoretical model formulated by Blanchard (2010) to derive an intuitive, empirically testable equation. This equation...

We show that the effects of tariff changes on welfare and import volume can be fully characterised by their effects on the generalised mean and variance of the tariff distribution. Using these tools, we derive new results for welfare- and market-access-improving tariff changes, which imply two...

Eastern enlargement of the EU promises gains, but also imposes fiscal costs on incumbent countries. A sensitive issue concerns immigration, jobs and wages. We address these issues in a general equilibrium framework, both analytically and through numerical simulations. Analytical results identify...

In part I of this paper, we have presented a general treatment of the welfare effect of an eastern EU enlargement on incumbent countries. Part II now takes a closer look at the Austrian case. We first present a few descriptive statistics on the role that east-west trade, as well as the pertinent...

An eastern Enlargement of the EU, from an incumbent country point of view, involves a fiscal burden from extending Union agricultural and cohesion plicies to new members, coupled with potential gains as well as adjustment problems deriving from an extended customs union and a larger single...

World trade has grown exponentially during the last 60 years. Admittedly, it is not clear if this development can be assigned to international trade agreements like the World Trade Organization or the Generalized System of Preferences as previous empirical studies found contradicting results. In...

This paper explores the role of country asymmetries for trade and industrial policies with heterogeneous firms. Our analysis delivers a number of novel results. First, trade policies, infrastructure policies and industrial policies which improve the business conditions in one country have...

The risk of default that business firms face is very significant and differs widely across countries. This paper explores the links between countries' business conditions and international trade embedment and the default risk at the country level from a theoretical point of view. Our main...