Purpose – Prior to the liberalisation of the clothing and textiles sector under the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) fears had been expressed about the potential impact on developing country suppliers. This paper seeks to establish the actual impact of the liberalisation of the EU and...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to briefly review the trends on clothing imports into the EU in 2008, the year when quantitative restrictions on all EU clothing imports lapsed. Design/methodology/approach – The paper looks at trade figures as reported by Eurostat and, in particular...

Using an econometric shift-share decomposition, we explain the redistribution of world market shares at the level of the product variety and by technological content. We decompose changes in market shares into structural eff ects (geographical and sectoral) and a pure performance e ffect. We...

Competitiveness has come to the forefront of the policy debate within the European Union, focusing on price competitiveness and intra-EU imbalances. But how to measure competitiveness properly, beyond price or cost competitiveness, remains an open methodological issue; and how can we explain the...

Using an econometric shift-share decomposition, we explain the redistribution of world market shares at the level of the product variety and by technological content. We decompose changes in market shares into structural effects (geographical and sectoral) and a pure performance effect. We...