The Role of Association Agreements within European Union Enlargement to Central and Eastern European Countries

Christophe Rault (), Robert Aurelian Sova () and Anamaria Diana Sova

No 2769, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: The main goal of regionalization is the creation of free trade areas and the guarantee for countries to accede to a widened market. Many studies dealing with the effects of regional free trade agreements on trade flows already exist in the economic literature and the explosion in the number of regional agreements among countries has recently stressed the key role of regionalization. However, the effects of agreements on trade were sometimes contradictory in those studies. These diverging results can be explained by the potential endogeneity bias of the agreement variable. Our research in this paper aims at reassessing the genuine role of associations. For this matter, we particularly study the association of Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC) with European Union countries. Our econometric analysis based on qualitative choice models highlights in particular why European countries chose to conclude an association agreement with CEEC, and stresses the fact that European Union countries select endogenously the conclusion of association agreements. We are also particularly interested in modeling the effect of the association agreement on export performances between countries, and to quantify its impact. When considering annual data for 4 CEEC and 19 OECD countries (1990-2004), we find a 0.17 positive impact of the association agreement on bilateral exports.

Keywords: European integration; gravity model; regionalization; qualitative choice models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E61 F13 F15 C25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-eec and nep-tra
Date: 2007-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations View citations in EconPapers (3) Track citations by RSS feed

Published in: Aussenwirtschaft : Schweizerische Zeitschrift für internationale Wirtschaftsbeziehungen /Swiss Review of International Economic Relations, 2008, Issue III

Downloads: (external link)
http://ftp.iza.org/dp2769.pdf (application/pdf)

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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp2769

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Address: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Fallak ().