In 2004, Frits Bolkenstein, former European Commissioner for the Internal Market, brought in the attention of the European Commission “The Services Directive in the Internal Market”. The purpose of this directive was to liberalize the services’ market in the EU, a major regulated field,...

Via partnership agreements like the Cotonou Partnership Agreement, the EU provides African countries with access to its markets and asks for compliance with a given set of good governance norms and procedures. While the EU markets are significant for African countries, African markets are not...

We analyze how a set of traditional as well as new determinants affect trade among European countries over the period 1992–2008. The factors encompass variables from the areas of geography, culture, institutions, infrastructure, and trade direction. Trade is analyzed for three types of goods:...

Recent empirical studies have been searching for evidence on and driving forces for offshoring. Frequently, this has been done by analyzing gross trade flows related to offshore activities using gravity equations augmented by ad hoc measures of supply-side country differences. This paper...

In a major setback for the EU, only two of four Eastern Partnership countries actually initialed Association Agreements at the Vilnius Summit in November 2013. This paper asks what went wrong and what can be done about it. Using a gravity model to estimate the effects of deep and shallow free...

From a microeconomic perspective competition between firms has been duely discussed. Extending microeconomic concepts to a macroeconomic level and considering competition between countries becomes more complex. The complexity issues is tackled in this study by extending a methodology developed...

In the following paper I intend to briefly analyze and discuss some of the major elements and influences that Romania’s integration into the European Union had on its external trade during the time frame beginning in 2002 and ending with the year that has just passed (2013). In order to...

Export diversification, which can be attained by changing the share of existing commodities (“intensive margin”) and including new commodities in the export portfolio (“extensive margin”), is needed to improve international competitiveness. In this study, we examine the significance of...

The aim of this article is to investigate services sectors' concentration in the European Union based on employment data and to disentangle the sector-specific developments and influential factors over time. We find that only the financial intermediation, retail trade and water transport sectors...

The objective of the paper is to present the impact of globalization conditions on trade flows between states. These determinants were considered as alternative factors for the physical distance between countries in the gravity model performed by Tinbergen (1962). In the traditional gravity...