On the Trade Balance Effects of Free Trade Agreements between the EU-15 and the CEEC-4 Countries
33 Pages Posted: 20 Jun 2008
Date Written: March 1, 2008
Abstract
The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC-4, i.e. Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania) and model their effects on trade flows by treating the agreement variable as endogenous. Our theoretical framework is the gravity model, and the econometric method used to isolate and eliminate the potential endogeneity bias of the agreement variable is the fixed effect vector decomposition (FEVD) technique. Our estimation results indicate a positive and significant impact of FTAs on trade flows. However, exports and imports are affected differently, leading to some disparity in trade flow performance between countries. Therefore, there is an asymmetric impact on the trade balance, the agreement variable resulting in a trade balance deficit in the CEEC.
Keywords: Regionalisation, European integration, Panel data methods
JEL Classification: E61, F13, F15, C25
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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