Trade in Western and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of COMECON: an assessment of behavioral change

Peter Egger, Michael Pfaffermayr and Roland Schmidt

Oxford Economic Papers, 2007, vol. 59, issue 1, 102-126

Abstract: In the early 1990s, leading economists have predicted huge unexhausted trade potentials associated with the political restraints under the COMECON regime. Besides the low Eastern per capita GDP figures associated with limited access to frontier technologies, the political regulation of West-East and also intra-East trade per se lead to discrepancies in the behavioral relationships. This paper addresses the question of whether changes in the determinants of trade such as market size and relative factor endowments or economic behavior (the different sensitivities of trade to its determinants) were responsible for these findings. Our empirical evidence from a large panel of bilateral European trade flows suggests that the conclusions differ sharply for East-West versus intra-East trade. Concerning East-West trade we observe pronounced convergence in behavior to intra-Western standards between the second and fourth considered phase of transition while for intra-East trade there is no such convergence in behavior. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpl020 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:oxecpp:v:59:y:2007:i:1:p:102-126

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Oxford Economic Papers is currently edited by James Forder and Francis J. Teal

More articles in Oxford Economic Papers from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().