Adopting a long term perspective covering four decades, we evaluate the trade performance of less developed African countries. Besides some general trade indicators, we apply a constant market share analysis in order to decompose export performance into several components with specific economic...

Considering the case of Portugal over the period 1995-2000, this paper analyses whether the location of market services is explained by the geographical proximity of the industrial sectors that use these services as intermediate inputs. A rather detailed level of regional disaggregation is used,...

There are theoretical reasons to expect that benefits to domestic firms from foreign direct investment would be confined to the area where the multinational firm is located and that the benefits depend on the development level of the host region. However, there is a scarcity of empirical studies...

The effects of the reduction of international trade costs on the internal economic geography of a country have been very scarcely studied in empirical terms. With data for Portugal since its adhesion to the European Union, we analyze the hypotheses put forward by the new economic geography...

Evidence on productivity spillovers from FDI to domestic firms is ambiguous. Incorrect estimation procedures may be one of the sources for the contradictory results obtained in empirical studies on this subject. We observe that inadequacy of the estimation procedures leads to a severe...