In pre-industrial Europe, growth was driven by the expansion of trade, and the expansion of trade was driven by falling trading costs. This paper discusses the mechanisms linking these processes–profit-seeking behavior by merchants, changes in the organization of production, technological progress, and urbanization. It then reviews the fluctuations in European economic growth between 1000 and 1...

International Integration, Risk and the Welfare State How does international integration affect the welfare state? Does it call for a leaner or an expanded welfare state? International integration may affect the distortions caused by welfare state activities but also the risks motivating social insurance mechanisms. This paper addresses these potentially counteracting effects in a fully specifi...

this paper investigates the effect of foreign trade and human capital on economic growth using pooling data for the oic member countries over the period 1980-2003. for this purpose, the soderbom-teal (2003) growth model is re-specified with the variables such as growth of manufacturing exports, manufacturing imports, human capital, labor force and physical capital. the empirical results indicat...

The paper studies the determinants of information sharing between Swedish tax authorities and 14 EU tax authorities for value-added tax (VAT) purposes. It is shown that trade-related variables (such as the partner country’s net trade position and population size), reciprocity, and legal arrangements are significant determinants of Sweden’s trade in tax information. Countries that are net export...

There is a protracted stalemate between rich (the North) and poor (the South) countries over the question of minimum labour standards in developing economies. This paper is a sequel to Singh and Zammit (2000). It considers afresh key issues in the controversy. While fully recognizing the moral, political and philosophical dimension of this complex issue, the paper concentrates on the central ec...

Applied general and partial equilibrium models are widely used tools for ex ante analysis of trade policy changes. However, simulation results seem to exhibit significant variation across publications, and the often criticised ‘black box’ character of applied trade models makes meaningful comparisons of simulation results very difficult. As a potential remedy, this paper presents a meta-analysi...

Are the costs of exporting to a market reduced if a firm has experience of exporting to a neighbouring market? If so, does this effect operate through reducing entry barriers or by increasing sales once the firm is operating in the market? This paper examines linkages between current export destinations and entry, sales and exit for new markets. We find that measures of exporting experience in ...

This paper examines the e↵ects of liquidity on the demand for imports of non-durable consumers’ goods in Trinidad and Tobago. A parsimonious vector equilibrium correction model (VEqCM) is used to test the hypotheses that liquidity has both longand short-run e↵ects. The multivariate cointegration approach of Johansen and Juselius (1990) is used to determine long-run relations and general to spec...

This paper provides empirical evidence for the interaction between firm-level total factor productivity and trade liberalization as key determinants of firm-level job destruction caused by trade. We also test some key theoretical predictions from Melitz (2003), whose model is used to derive an explicit equation relating firm productivity and trade-induced labor layoff when a country liberalizes...

How Opportunity Costs Decrease the Probability of War in an Incomplete Information Game This paper shows that the opportunity costs resulting from economic interdependence decrease the equilibrium probability of war in an incomplete information game. This result is strongly consistent with existing empirical analyses of the inverse trade-conflict relationship, but is the opposite of the conclus...