There are three well-known observations about the current regional trade policy of Europe. The first one is the central role played by the European Union in the worldwide spreading of regional agreements. The second is the new policy of signing bilateral deep regional trade agreements. The third...

type="main" xml:id="twec12178-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>We analyse the relationship between regional trade integration and trade costs in services. The analysis relies on theory-consistent bilateral trade costs for 55 countries for 1999–2009 and an analysis of services commitments in 66 regional...</p>

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">Abstract</heading> We show in this paper that increasing the transparency of the trading environment can be an important complement to traditional liberalisation of tariff and non-tariff barriers. Our definition of transparency is grounded in a transaction cost analysis. We focus on two dimensions of...