The decline of most world commodity prices came to an end in recent months. The aggregate dollar price level was 15 per cent lower in the first quarter of 1999 compared to a year previously, and since autumn 1997 it even decreased by about 30 per cent. Oil prices fell particularly sharply, but...

The European Union is currently negotiating free trade agreements, called Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), with African countries as part of the Cotonou Agreement between the European Union and African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. The paper empirically assesses the impact of the EPAs...

This paper takes a welfare-view on eastern enlargement of the EU, focusing on incumbent countries. Enlargement is decomposed into three elements: Single-market integration on commodity markets, budgetary costs from EU-expenditure policies, and single market- induced migration from new to present...

This paper presents the first empirical test with German establishment level data of a hypothesis derived by Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple in a model that explains the decision of heterogeneous firms to serve foreign markets either trough exports or foreign direct investment: only the more...

This study discriminates FDI technology spillover from learning effects. Whenever learning takes time, our model predicts that foreign investors deduct the economic value of learning from wages of inexperienced workers and add it to experienced ones to prevent them from moving to local...

The paper empirically explores the international linkages between gender inequality and trade flows of a sample of 92 developed and developing countries. The focus is on comparative advantage in labour-intensive manufactured goods. The results indicate that gender wage inequality is positively...

The global welfare implications of home market effects in trade models with imperfect competition are little understood. This paper proposes a simple model in which such implications can be easily analyzed. It shows an overall tendency of imperfectly competitive sectors to inefficiently cluster...

This paper uses an unbalanced panel data set for exporting firms from manufacturing industries in one German federal state, Lower Saxony, to investigate the micro-structure of the recent export boom. Looking at data for 1995/96 to 2001/02 it is demonstrated that a considerable number of plants...

The paper addresses the linkage between certain aspects of the increasing economic integration of world markets and the level of child labour. We empirically examine, first, the often-cited conventional wisdom that multinational enterprises invest in countries where the extent of child labour is...

The tradition of gravity models is in the analysis of trade flows with market size and geographic or economic distance as core variables. Both these variables can be important determinants of FDI, too. However, when such models are used to explain FDI, there can be differences in the mode of...