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Towards an Integrated Europe
TLDR
Baldwin this article assesses the alternative paths towards European economic and political integration and proposes a more positive and consistent approach to the architecture of Europe, which will benefit from Baldwin's insights and the challenge he puts forward for a more consistent approach.Abstract:
Powerful political and economic forces are driving a rapid integration of post-communist Europe, yet short-term political considerations have produced piecemeal trade arrangements instead of a coherent structure. Individual agreements have been signed linking the European Union to several Central and East European countries (CEECs), EFTA to several CEECs, a few CEECs to each other and EU to EFTA. Although the agreements have many similar features, most have been negotiated separately; their coverage differs significantly; and there are no links among them. Is this maze of bilateral deals the best configuration for promoting pan-European growth and stability? How will these agreements and their interactions influence growth, trade, investment, migration and income disparities in Europe? Richard Baldwin has marshalled the best available empirical evidence and analytic techniques to establish a framework for organizing our thinking on why the structure and pattern of trade arrangements matters. On this basis, he assesses the alternative paths towards European economic and political integration. The economic analysis is objective, but political economy on this scale is likely to lead to strong policy conclusions, as indeed it does here. Aspects of his own proposal will be controversial, but it offers a deeply considered basis for further discussion and ultimately for action. All will benefit from Baldwin's insights and the challenge he puts forward for a more positive and consistent approach to the architecture of Europe.read more
Citations
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The Community Trap: Liberal Norms, Rhetorical Action, and the Eastern Enlargement of the European Union
TL;DR: In this article, a sociological perspective is used to explain the enlargement of the European Community, in which enlargement is understood as the expansion of international community, and the bargaining process between Central and Eastern Europe and the European Union is viewed as an international discipline.
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The growth of world trade: tariffs, transport costs, and income similarity
TL;DR: Hummels and Levinsohn as mentioned in this paper investigated the relative effects of transport-cost reductions, tariff liberalization, and income convergence on the growth of world trade among several OECD countries between the late 1950s and the late 1980s.
Journal Article
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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A note on the proper econometric specification of the gravity equation
TL;DR: In this article, the superiority of a fixed effects model over a random effects model is argued both along intuitive and econometric lines based on a Hausman test, and the authors shed some light on the problems associated with random effects gravity approaches.
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Regional economic integration
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present details on regional economic integration and evaluate some of the voluminous literature, theoretical and applied, on the economic effects of regional integration agreements (RIAs).
References
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Book
Geography and Trade
TL;DR: Paul Krugman as mentioned in this paper argues that the location of production in space is a key issue both within and between nations and provides a stimulating synthesis of ideas in the literature and describes new models for implementing a study of economic geography that could change the nature of the field.
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A new set of international comparisons of real product and price levels estimates for 130 countries, 1950–1985
Robert Summers,Alan Heston +1 more
TL;DR: The Penn World Table (Mark 4) as mentioned in this paper is a completely revised and updated expansion of an equivalent table published by the authors in 1984, drawing on the data of two previously unavailable international comparison benchmark studies.
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Opening up international trade with Eastern Europe
Carl B. Hamilton,L. Alan Winters +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors developed an empirical model of trade flows between existing market economies, and used this to forecast long-run trade flows as the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are reabsorbed into the world economy.
Posted Content
The Trading Potential of Eastern Europe
Zhen Kun Wang,L. Winters +1 more
TL;DR: The authors fit a gravity model to the trade of 76 market economies and applied the model to data on East European economies to estimate what their trading potential might have been, had behaved like market economies in the mid-1980s.