Afrika ist ein Kontinent mit immensen Zukunftschancen, steht aber großen Herausforderungen gegenüber. Das Wirtschaftswachstum der vergangenen Jahre war vielerorts hoch, die Bevölkerung wird sich bis 2050 verdoppeln, aber die Pro-Kopf-Einkommen sind immer noch sehr niedrig. Das wirtschaftliche...

The European Union is the world’s largest and deepest free trade zone. Amongst its members, it has abolished tariffs and lowered non-tariff barriers. This has led to trade creation within Europe and to trade diversion between EU countries and outsiders. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment...

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...

The Schengen Agreement has guaranteed unchecked travel across internal EU borders since 1995. Has it also facilitated trade flows? Our econometric analysis suggests that Schengen has boosted trade by 3% on average (equivalent to a drop in tariffs by 0.7 percentage points). Goods trade is more...

Do the U.S. have a current account surplus or a deficit with the EU? Since 2009, official sources disagree: The U.S. Department of Commerce claims a consistent U.S. surplus while Eurostat reports the opposite. International transactions are notoriously difficult to measure accurately, but the...

The world runs a trade surplus with itself: the reported values of exports exceed the reported values of imports. This is a logically impossible but well-known empirical fact. Less wellknown is the fact that, in recent years, more than 80 percent of the global surplus is a trade surplus that the...

Do the U.S. have a current account surplus or a deficit with the EU? Since 2009, official sources disagree: The U.S. Department of Commerce claims a consistent U.S. surplus while Eurostat reports the opposite. International transactions are notoriously difficult to measure accurately, but the...