Gravity equations have been used for more than 50 years to estimate ex post the partial effects of trade costs on international trade flows, and the well-known - and traditionally presumed exogenous - "trade-cost elasticity" plays a central role in computing general equilibrium trade-flow and...

Trade and investment can be effective means of implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. However, stand-alone trade and investment liberalization policies aimed at enhancing economic development may have negative side-effects on non-economic facets of sustainable development. As...

The goal of this investigation is to research the development of intensive and extensive trade margins on product-country level data for Croatia during the period 2000–2012. Hypothesis of our paper is that RTAs-induced trade liberalization will have heterogeneous effects on particular product...

Will the current wave of regional integration arrangements lead to the world being divided into competing inward-looking trading blocs? Or will it lead to a more open multilateral trading system? Using a multicountry political economy model, and after having shown that global free trade is...

A deranged publisher decided to produce a volume of some of my papers and asked me to write some comments. Since these amount to a summary of my views about international trade theory over the latest forty years or so, I'm giving the comments a separate alternative existence as a discussion paper

This paper first investigates the pattern of trade and industrial productivity in the ASEAN, China, and India (ACI). By using highly disaggregated COMTRADE data during 1998-2008, I find that the ACI countries exhibit significant productivity growth in manufacturing sectors. Both international...

While "mega FTAs" and WTO-driven efforts at multilateral liberalisation dominate the agenda, customs unions (CU) are the silent success story of regional integration. Throughout the world, CUs have been superseding earlier FTAs, as new unions were formed or old ones expanded. Due to problems of...

This paper explores the impact of vertical specialization on world trade within the framework of the O-ring theory of production. Within such a framework there is little scope for substituting quantity for quality or for gaining market shares by undercutting established suppliers purely on cost....

Arguably, leveraging on the intraregional market is important for a commodity like palm oil that has been constantly facing challenges to sustain global demand in extra-regional markets. The paper therefore compares intraregional export potentials for palm oil in two regions that are at the...

Preferential trade agreements are meant to promote trade within the targeted region. Once such agreements are put into effect, it is interesting to investigate the impact and effectiveness in the targeted region. This paper analyzes world trade network as a graph and introduces the measure to...