The present work analyses the impact of free trade agreements (FTAs) on the improvement of trade flows for ten Middle East and North African Countries (MENA) for the period 1990-2010. An extended gravity model is estimated to analyse the average and individual impact of six FTAs (four...

Trade policy barriers are only one element of overall trade costs. Among these, and due to the decrease in the influence of tariff barriers on trade over time, institutional barriers might increase in relative importance and become a key obstacle to the movements of goods across countries. This...

This paper investigates the link between foreign aid and exports between the two shores of the Mediterranean. The main hypothesis is that the Euro-Mediterranean Process should promote not only trade but also stronger links between the European Union (EU) and the Middle East and North Africa...

A growing body of literature has recently focused on the economic origins and consequences of modern maritime piracy and on the perception that the international community has failed to control it. This paper aims to investigate maritime transport costs as one of the channels through which...

This paper is the first to explore the links between exporting and importing activities of Egyptian firms using panel data over the period from 2003 to 2007. The main aim is twofold. Firstly, the authors report regression results indicating that firms that both export and import are the most...

The issues of zero trade observations and the validity of the log linear transformation of the gravity equation have generated a number of debates in the literature with differing claims about the most suitable estimation technique. To produce unbiased and consistent estimates for policy making,...