This paper reconsiders the theoretical foundations of EU regional policy in economics. It begins with a discussion of the line of thought of its prevalent explanation in equilibrium economics which is focusing on market failures as its key underpinning and which is the major toolkit of...

The data show that an increase in government provided old-age pensions is strongly correlated with a reduction in fertility. What type of model is consistent with this finding? We explore this question using two models of fertility: one by Barro and Becker (1989), and one inspired by Caldwell...

Many tourism destinations have enacted and implemented laws to protect residents as consumers that are relevance to tourists as consumers. In literature, consumer protection is not explicitly considered and analyzed in the area of destination competitiveness by research ers. This research...

We investigate trade integration between members of the EU, NAFTA and Mercosur. The paper evaluates the ease of access to each of those markets from each other based on a benchmark consisting of trade within countries. This methodology, often labelled border effects, furnishes a new tool for the...

The welfare effects of Brexit on the UK, the EU27 and the rest of the world are analysed in a model of international trade under oligopoly. A hard Brexit where the UK trades according to WTO rules is shown to decrease total UK welfare, to have an ambiguous effect on total EU27 welfare, and to...

Trade economists traditionally study the effect of lower variable trade costs. While increasingly important politically, technical barriers to trade (TBTs) have received less attention. Viewing TBTs as fixed regulatory costs related to the entry into export markets, we use a model with...

Global Value Chains (GVCs) became the paradigm for the production of most goods and services around the world. Hence, interconnections among countries can no longer be adequately assessed through standard bilateral gross trade flows and new methods of analysis are needed. In this paper, we...

We discuss how standard computable equilibrium models of trade policy can be enriched with selection effects without missing other important channels of adjustment. This is achieved by estimating and simulating a partial equilibrium model that accounts for a number of real world effects of trade...