Over the last decade, European Union members have experienced a dramatic increase in imports. This increase was accompanied by a strong growth in the number of imported goods and trading partners, indicating positive welfare gains for consumers via an extended set of consumption possibilities,...

The recent global financial crisis has had a diverse effect on countries’ fiscal stance, especially throughout the EU. This paper examines the impact of macroeconomic shocks, including those to government revenues and expenditures, on EU countries’ fiscal stance, on aggregate, and within the...

This paper investigates the effect of aggregate shocks on the fiscal stance of the EU, and of its old (OMS) and new (NMS) member states over a business cycle. The fiscal stance is measured by the government deficit. To study the impact of aggregate shocks, we use impulse responses derived from a...

In this paper, we apply the methodology developed by Feenstra (1994) and Broda and Weinstein (2006) to estimate the gains from imported variety for the 27 countries of the European Union using Eurostat data from the period of 1999 to 2008. Our results show that newer and smaller member states...