Assessing the impact of the EU-sponsored trade liberalization in the MENA countries

Jan Hagemejer and Andrzej Cieślik

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The EU-sponsored Barcelona conference in 1995 set the ambitious goal of creating the Euro-Mediterranean Free Trade Area (EUROMED) that would include the European Union and the MENA countries by 2010. The intermediate steps towards building the EUROMED have involved bilateral “vertical” trade liberalization between the EU and the particular MENA countries as well as “horizontal” trade liberalization among themselves. In this paper we evaluate empirically the effects of the new EU Association Agreements with the MENA countries using the augmented gravity equations derived from a variety of neoclassical and new trade theory models and panel data for the period 1980-2004. We find that while these agreements increased significantly imports of the MENA countries from the EU they had no positive impact on their exports to the EU which can be attributed to the asymmetry in trade liberalization between the EU and the MENA countries.

Keywords: bilateral trade; gravity equation; preferential trade liberalization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F11 F12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-eec and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Published in Journal of Economic Integration 2.24(2009): pp. 344-369

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/17721/2/MPRA_paper_17721.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/37131/1/MPRA_paper_37131.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Assessing the Impact of the EU-sponsored Trade Liberalization in the MENA Countries (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:17721

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().