The objective of this paper is twofold. First, against the background of an existing empirical literature on the duration of trade which has found that international trade is often of strikingly short duration, we aim to establish whether or not EU imports from the rest of the world also are...

A main component of customs unions is a common trade policy on imports from non-member countries. Trade policy covers both tariff and non-tariff barriers like trade procedures. We argue that since trade procedures vary markedly across EU countries, the EU is not, strictly speaking, a customs...

The objective of the paper is to explore and give an overview of two central policy alternatives to improve the integration between the European Union and developing countries by removing barriers to trade: trade preferences and trade facilitation. After reviewing the relevant literatures and...

Aiming to explore how the survival of trade flows has evolved over time, we analyze a rich data set of detailed imports to individual EU15 countries from 140 non-EU exporters, covering the period 1962–2006. We find that short duration is a persistent characteristic of trade throughout the...

The current political turmoil in the Arab world has contributed to renewed interest in the Barcelona Process. This paper explores whether deeper integration in the form of trade facilitation – i.e. improved and simplified trade procedures – could be an important part of a reform agenda....

This paper assesses the potential effects from trade facilitation in terms of increased trade flows both on average and specifically for the six regional groups of ACP countries negotiating Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with the EU. Data from the World Bank’s Doing Business Database...

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, against the background of an existing empirical literature on the duration of trade which has found that international trade is often of strikingly short duration, we aim to establish whether or not EU imports from the rest of the world also are...

The recent literature on the duration of trade has predominantly analyzed the determinants of trade flow durations using Cox proportional hazards models. The purpose of this paper is to show why it is inappropriate to analyze the duration of trade with continuous-time models such as the Cox...