A disaggregated analysis of EU imports: the implications for the study of patterns of trade and technology

This paper examines trends in the unit prices of manufactured imports into the European Union (EU) in the period 1988--2002. This is undertaken at a high level of disaggregation, and it is this decomposition which we believe has important implications both for a range of bodies of economic analysis and for policy. The analyses undertaken in this paper confirm that disaggregation matters in helping to identify unit-price trends. We have also shown that unit-price trends vary with the type of economy exporting into Europe and the type of product being exported, and that these results are robust at high levels of disaggregation. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.