Search results for "International Trade"
showing 10 items of 246 documents
Negotiating the European External Action Service (EEAS): Analyzing the External Effects of Internal (Dis)Agreement*
2012
Analyses of the rising capacity for co-ordination within the Secretariats-General of the European Commission and Council have concentrated on their effects within these respective institutions. This article, in contrast, argues that the presence/absence of co-ordination capacities developed within an institution may have an important bearing also on the relations between institutions (for example, in inter-institutional negotiations). The empirical analysis traces the negotiation process leading up to the creation of the European External Action Service (EEAS), and finds substantial support for the theoretical argument.
European Integration and the Disembedding of Labour Market Regulation: Transnational Labour Relations at theEuropeanCentralBank Construction Site
2013
European integration through mutual recognition has facilitated the growth of a pan-European labour supply system in which transnational subcontractors ‘post’ workers from low-wage areas to higher wage areas. This allows employers to create spaces of exception in which the national industrial relations system of the country where work occurs does not fully apply. Drawing on interviews with managers, workers, unionists and works councillors at the European Central Bank construction site in Frankfurt, Germany, this article shows how transnational subcontracting allows employers to access, and create competition between, sovereign regulatory regimes. It concludes that high-cost, high-collectiv…
Quality pricing-to-market
2014
We examine firm's pricing-to-market decisions in vertically differentiated industries featuring a large number of firms that compete monopolistically in the quality space. Firms sell goods of heterogeneous quality to consumers with non-homothetic preferences that differ in their income and thus their marginal willingness to pay for quality increments. We derive closed-form solutions for the pricing game under costly international trade, thus establishing existence and uniqueness. We then examine how the interaction of good quality and market demand for quality affects firms' pricing-to-market decisions. The relative price of high quality goods compared to that of low quality goods is an inc…
Patents, technological inputs and spillovers among regions
2009
This paper analyses the importance of different technological inputs (R&D and human capital) and different spillovers in explaining the differences in patenting among Spanish regions in the period 1986-2003. The analysis is based on the estimation of a knowledge production function. A region¿s own R&D activities and human capital are observed to have a positive significant effect on innovation output, measured by the number of patents. R&D spillovers weighted by the distance and the volume of trade flows between regions cause positive effects on a region¿s patents. However, distance matters more than the intensity of trade flows and the R&D spillover effects between regions are bounded: spi…
Within and between firm trends in job polarization : the roles of globalization and technology
2019
AbstractWe analyze occupational polarization within and across firms using a census of matched employer–employee panel data from Finland in the period of 2000–2014. As in most industrialized countries, the Finnish occupational distribution has polarized over the last decades. Using decomposition analysis, we find that jobs involving low-level service tasks increase mostly through the entry dynamics, while the high-level abstract task share increases largely within continuing firms. Worker-level occupational mobility points to some skill upgrading within continuing firms, while labor force entry and retirement contribute the polarizing trend. Instrumental variables (IVs) regressions confirm …
Offshoring in the European Union: a Study of the Evolution of the Tax Burden
2017
One of the most serious effects of offshoring is tax avoidance, which harms the economies of the affected regions. In an attempt to eradicate tax avoidance, the EU seeks to establish tax harmonization across its Member States. Based on data for 2006-2014, this study analyzes the historical evolution and current trends of a convergence or divergence of the tax burden for 15 EU Member States. The effective tax rate was used to assess the tax burden. This study used a novel approach to analyze the tax burden and conducted a cluster analysis to examine changes in the effective tax rates between 2006 and 2014. The results imply that when the economy prospers, effective tax rates tend to converge…
A microeconometric analysis of the springboard subsidiary: The case of Spanish firms
2015
Abstract This paper provides a microeconometric analysis of the distinctive characteristics of springboard subsidiaries that have a positive impact on the subsidiaries’ performance. Based on panel data estimations for subsidiaries of European multinational companies with a presence in Spain, the authors found that if the subsidiary is located in the springboard country, then the performance improvement (increase in profit margin) of the subsidiary is about 49 percentage points. When the Spanish subsidiary is considered a springboard subsidiary, its performance is 7.7 percentage points higher than the performance of other subsidiaries that are not springboard subsidiaries. If the subsidiary …
Product and Labour Market Regulations, Production Prices, Wages and Productivity
2016
ACLN; International audience; This study is an attempt to evaluate the effects of product and labour market regulations on industry productivity through their various impacts on changes in production prices and wages. In a first stage, the estimation of a regression equation on an industry*country panel, with controls for country*industry and country*year fixed effects, show that multi-factor productivity is negatively and significantly influenced by both indicators of industrial prices from same industry and weighted average of industrial prices from other industries, and by indicators of country wages weighted by industry labour shares for low and high skilled workers. In a second stage, …
Still Going “Grey” After All These Years? Export Restraint Agreements and the WTO
2013
This chapter assesses how the dual strategy that aimed to eliminate "grey area" measures has worked out in practice, also in the light of the protectionist pressures unleashed by the current economic crisis. After providing a brief overview of the historic proliferation of these measures, it discusses whether the attempt to render ordinary safeguard measures a more attractive alternative to voluntary restraint agreements (VRAs) has worked in practice. The chapter analyses some of the intrinsic and extrinsic weaknesses of the ban itself. The chapter reviews some cases of export-restraint agreements arguably falling within the exceptions to the ban enshrined in Art. 11.1.C. This work has exam…
Impact of Transport Costs on International Trade: The Case of Spanish Ceramic Exports
2003
This paper aims to investigate the determinants of maritime and overland transport costs and the role they play in deterring trade across countries. We estimate a transport cost function using data on maritime and overland transport of the ceramic sector (tiles) obtained from interviews held with Spanish logistics operators. We also study the relationship between transport costs and trade and estimate an import demand model for ceramic products. Additionally, we present a discussion on the sensitivity of trade flows and transportation costs to the existence of back-hauling, special conditions for transport and number of reloads.1 The study of modal transport (overland versus maritime) and i…