This paper makes a tentative forecast of the impact on Spanish trade of the liberalization of economic transactions between the EU and the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEECs), as envisaged in the Association Agreements aimed at the eventual enlargement of the EU to...

How are the benefits - and costs - of a customs union divided between member countries? Outcomes depend on the comparative advantage of member countries, relative to each other and to the rest of the world. Countries with a comparative advantage between that of their partners and the rest of the...

We apply a new approach to a new panel data set on bilateral gross cross-border equity flows between 14 countries, 1989-96. The remarkably good results have strong implications for theories of asset trade. We find that the geography of information heavily determines the pattern of international...

The paper applies a gravity model to 1980-1996 annual non-fuel imports data for 58 countries to quantify the effects of recently created or revamped PTAs on trade. We modify the usual gravity equation to identify separate effects of PTAs on intra-bloc trade, members' total imports and their...

Empirical research on the gravity model of international trade in the wake of Rose (2000) affirms that currency union formation doubles or triples trade. Currency unions could, however, also be established precisely because trade among their members was already high. In OLS estimation, this...

The gravity model of trade is utilized to assess the impact of disintegration on trade. The analysis is based on three recent disintegration episodes involving the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The results point to a very strong home bias around the time of disintegration,...

Recent events, historical evidence and geographical proximity suggest that the six EFTAns and twelve Central and East European countries (CEECs) are natural trading partners. This paper evaluates this suggestion by estimating the potential for EFTA-CEEC trade using the gravity model of Wang and...

This paper fits a gravity model to the trade of 76 market economies. It then applies the model to data on East European economies to estimate what their trading potential might have been, had behaved like market economies in the mid-1980s. At existing levels of national income, the...

This paper considers the impact on trade of preferential arrangements in Europe since the 1950s. Using a first difference version of the gravity model, we find that the EEC and EFTA altered the pattern of international trade. We also find evidence of trade diversion in several cases, notably...

We work with a panel of bilateral trade flows from 1988 to 2002, exploring the influence of infrastructure, institutional quality, colonial and geographic context, and trade preferences on the pattern of bilateral trade. We are interested in threshold effects, and so emphasize those cases where...