EU Integration and Trade: a Look from the Outside of the EU Eastern Border?

Oleksandr Shepotylo

No 22, Discussion Papers from Kyiv School of Economics

Abstract: This paper develops a methodology for trade policy analysis of costs and benefits of alternative regional integration scenarios, based on the disaggregated gravity equation, and applies it to calculate the impact of the EU enlargement on integration strategies of non-member countries. In particular, the paper measures the impact of the 2004 EU enlargement from the standpoint of Ukraine – a country that has been lost in transition; Ukraine moves away from CIS, but does not get closer to EU. This angle allows estimating the costs of non-integration that occurred due to trade and investment diversion, and forgone opportunity to carry our structural changes in the Ukrainian economy. According to the results, EU accession would have had a small positive effect on total export volumes but would have dramatically changed the composition of Ukrainian exports by almost doubling exports of manufactured goods by 2007. The costs of non-integration accumulate towards the end of the investigated period. Projecting the results into the future clearly indicates that the benefits of EU accession for Ukraine would have been unambiguously positive and would overweight benefits of CIS integration.

Keywords: Gravity model; EU enlargement; Ukraine; CIS; heterogeneous firms; trade policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 F12 F17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int and nep-tra
Note: Under review in the Economics of Transition
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.kse.org.ua/pdf/KSE_dp22.pdf November 2009 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
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:kse:dpaper:22

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Kyiv School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Iryna Sobetska ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).