World trade contracted sharply in late 2008 and early 2009 following the deepening of the financial crisis in September 2008. This paper discusses the main mechanisms behind the global downturn in trade and its impact on euro area exports and competitiveness. It finds that the euro area was hit...

The onset of the financial crisis in 2008 has highlighted the problems of diverging external imbalances within Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the role of persistent losses in competitiveness. This paper starts by investigating some of the competitiveness factors which contributed to...

By studying the factors underlying differences in trade performance across European economies, this paper derives six different “trade models” for 22 EU-countries and explores their developmental and distributional dynamics. We first introduce a typology of trade models by clustering...

Globalisation can be a threat or an opportunity, depending on a country’s trade mix and its economic and regulatory structure. This paper assesses which EU countries are most exposed to globalisation using, among other indicators, measures of revealed comparative advantage. It then looks at...

At the core of the formation of the European Union (EU) in 1993 was the economic goal to create a European Common Market to ensure freer trade and perhaps to create an egalitarian Europe. The post-1993 period saw the biggest enlargement of the EU to date from a meagre 3 member countries...

Ukraine's choice of European association and Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with the EU over membership in the Eurasian Customs Union (ECU) advocated by Russia has plunged the country into chaos and led to the most serious security crisis in Europe since the end of the Cold...

This paper tests, in the context of the EU countries, the evidence presented by Hidalgo and Hausmann (2009) that economic complexity indicator is a good predictor of economic growth. Our results suggest that a group of countries in the EU with an economic complexity exceeding a certain threshold...

We revisit Western Europe's record with labor-productivity convergence and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and greater...

We build a two-country currency union DSGE model with endogenous growth to assess the role of cross-country differences in product and labor market regulations for long-term growth and for the adjustment to shocks. We show that with endogenous growth, there is no reason to expect real income...

Economic growth is a frequently analyzed aspect, both from theoretical and empirical standpoint, under the impact of the influence factors, while the issue of economic growth was studied by applying different methods and obtaining different results. In the case of EU28, the problem of economic...