This paper analyses the effects of international fragmentation in terms of intermediate goods trade on the dynamics of the skilled-to-unskilled labour wage bill ratio in 14 manufacturing industries of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Both intermediate goods exports and imports of the CEEC...

In the early 1990s, leading economists have predicted huge unexhausted trade potentials associated with the political restraints under the COMECON regime. Besides the low Eastern per capita GDP figures associated with limited access to frontier technologies, the political regulation of West-East...

Production processes are increasingly organized in international value-chain networks. The involved firms can be operating at arm’s length or be vertically integrated. Both the incidence and the direction of integration (backward or forward in the value chain) depend on specific...

This paper investigates hypotheses about the determinants of trade and investment liberalisation with a particular focus on the market access and national treatment commitments under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). We set up a database of these GATS commitments and use the...

In a cross-section where the initial distribution of observations differs from the steady-state distribution and initial values matter, convergence is best measured in terms of σ-convergence over a fixed time period. For this setting, we propose a new simple Wald test for conditional...