The specification of the world closure, i.e. the way of closing the domestic economy model by incorporating the external sector, is a crucial component for those models in which production and consumption is not specified endogenously for all countries. This paper looks explicitly at the...

Ideally a new reform of the EU trade regime for bananas (COMB) should be equipped in a way that it makes a long-term contribution to the realisation of sustainable goals, or at least does not prevent them. From a point of view of sustainable development, a trade restriction measure has to...

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,...

This paper studies the great collapse in value added trade using a structural decomposition analysis. We show that changes in vertical specialisation accounted for almost half of the great trade collapse, while the previous literature on gross trade has mainly focused on final expenditure,...

For a very long time, the areas available for continuous long-distance trade were limited to territories the size of Braudel's Mediterranée (1949). Whatever the commercial organizations (merchants in the Roman or the Fatimid Empires, the Hanseatic League, the Florentine Companies), their trade...